
Class, "Pff^ffi i? 
Book ljC_S 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 



BY 



THOMAS CARLYLE. 



LONDON: 

CHAPMAN AND HALL, 193, PICCADILLY. 

1853. 



[First printed in Eraser's Magazine, No. 28 (May 1832), as a 
review of the Book entitled, The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. ; 
including a Tour to the Hebrides : By James Bosivell, LJsq.- 
A New Edition, with numerous Additions and Notes; £ 
John Wilson CroTcer, LL.D., F.R.S. 5 vols. London, 1831.- 
Eeprinted here without alteration.] 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 



iEsop's Fly, sitting on the axle of the chariot, has 
been much laughed at for exclaiming: What a 
dust I do raise ! Yet which of us, in his way, has 
not sometimes been guilty of the like ? Nay, so 
foolish are men, they often, standing at ease and 
as spectators on the highway, will volunteer to 
exclaim of the Fly (not being tempted to it, as 
he was) exactly to the same purport : What a dust 
thou dost raise ! Smallest of mortals, when 
mounted aloft by circumstances, come to seem 
great ; smallest of phenomena connected with them 
are treated as important, and must be sedulously 
scanned, and commented upon with loud emphasis. 
That Mr. Croker should undertake to edit Bos- 
well's Life of Johnson, was a praiseworthy but no 
miraculous procedure: neither could the accom- 
plishment of such undertaking be, in an epoch 
like ours, anywise regarded as an event in Uni- 
versal History ; the right or the wrong accomplish- 
ment thereof was, in very truth, one of the most 

B 



& SAMUEL JOHNSON. 

insignificant of things. However, it sat in a great 
environment, on the axle of a high, fast-rolling, 
parliamentary chariot ; and all the world has ex- 
claimed over it, and the author of it : "What a dust 
thou dost raise ! List to the Reviews, and ' Organs 
of Public Opinion/ from the National Omnibus 
upwards : criticisms, vituperative and laudatory, 
stream from their thousand throats of brass and of 
leather; here chaunting Io-pceans ; there grating 
harsh thunder, or vehement shrewmouse squeak- 
lets ; till the general ear is filled, and nigh deaf- 
ened. BoswelPs Book had a noiseless birth, com- 
pared with this Edition of BoswelPs Book. On the 
other hand, consider with what degree of tumult 
Paradise Lost and the Iliad were ushered in ! 

To swell such clamour, or prolong it beyond the 
time, seems nowise our vocation here. At most/ 
perhaps, we are bound to inform simple readers, 
with all possible brevity, what manner of perform- 
ance and Edition this is; especially, whether, in 
our poor judgment, it is worth laying out three 
pounds sterling upon, yea or not. The whole 
business belongs distinctly to the lower ranks of 
the trivial class. 

Let us admit, then, with great readiness, that 
as Johnson once said, and as the Editor repeats, 
c all works which describe manners require notes in 
sixty or seventy years, or less; ; that, accordingly, 
a new Edition of Boswell was desirable ; and that 
Mr. Croker has given one. For this task he had 



MR. 

various qualifications : his own voluntary resolution 
to do it ; his high place in society, unlocking all 
manner of archives to him; not less, perhaps, a 
certain anecdotico-biographic turn of mind, natural 
or acquired ; we mean, a love for the minuter events 
of History, and talent for investigating these. Let 
us admit too, that he has been very diligent ; seems 
to have made inquiries perseveringly far and near ; 
as well as drawn freely from his own ample stores ; 
and so tells us, to appearance quite accurately, 
much that he has not found lying on the highways, 
but has had to seek and dig for. Numerous per- 
sons, chiefly of quality, rise to view in these Notes ; 
when and also where they came into this world, 
received office or promotion, died and were buried 
(only what they did, except digest, remaining often 
too mysterious), — is faithfully enough set down. 
Whereby all that their various and doubtless 
widely-scattered Tombstones could have taught us, 
is here presented, at once, in a bound Book. Thus 
is an indubitable conquest, though a small one, 
gained over our great enemy, the all-destroyer 
Time ; and as such shall have welcome. 

Nay, let us say that the spirit of Diligence, ex- 
hibited in this department, seems to attend the 
Editor honestly throughout : he keeps everywhere 
a" watchful outlook on his Text ; reconciling the 
distant with the present, or at least indicating 
and regretting their irreconcilability ; elucidating, 
smoothing down ; in all ways exercising, according 



4 SAMUEL JOHNSON. 

to ability, a strict editorial superintendence. Any- 
little Latin or even Greek phrase is rendered into 
English, in general with perfect accuracy; cita- 
tions are verified, or else corrected. On all hands, 
moreover, there is a certain spirit of Decency 
maintained and insisted on : if not good morals, 
yet good manners, are rigidly inculcated; if not 
Religion, and a devout Christian heart, yet Ortho- 
doxy, and a cleanly, Shovel-hatted look, — which, 
as compared with flat Nothing, is something very 
considerable. Grant too, as no contemptible tri- 
umph of this latter spirit, that though the Editor 
is known as a decided Politician and Party-man, 
he has carefully subdued all temptations to trans- 
gress in that way : except by quite involuntary 
indications, and rather as it were the pervading 
temper of the whole, you could not discover on 
which side of the Political Warfare he is enlisted 
and fights. This, as we said, is a great triumph 
of the Decency-principle : for this, and for these 
other graces and performances, let the Editor have 
all praise. 

Herewith, however, must the praise unfortu- 
nately terminate. Diligence, Fidelity, Decency, 
are good and indispensable : yet, without Faculty, 
without Light, they will not do the work. Along 
with that Tombstone-information, perhaps even 
without much of it, we could have liked to gain 
some answer, in one way or other, to this wide 
question: What and how was English Life in 



Johnson's time ; wherein has ours grown to differ 
therefrom ? In other words : What things have 
we to forget, what to fancy and remember, before 
we, from such' distance, can put ourselves in John- 
son's place ; and so, in the full sense of the term, 
wider stand him, his sayings and his doings ? This 
was indeed specially the problem which a Com- 
mentator and Editor had to solve : a complete so- 
lution of it should have lain in him, his whole 
mind should have been filled and prepared with 
perfect insight into it ; then, whether in the way 
of express Dissertation, or of incidental Exposition 
and Indication, opportunities enough would have 
occurred of bringing out the same : what was dark 
in the figure of the Past had thereby been en- 
lightened; Boswell had, not in shew and word 
only, but in very fact, been made new again, read- 
able to us who are divided from him, even as he 
was to those close at hand. Of all which very 
little has been attempted here ; accomplished, we 
should say, next to nothing, or altogether nothing. 
Excuse, no doubt, is in readiness for such omis- 
sion ; and, indeed, for innumerable other failings ; — 
as where, for example, the Editor will punctually 
explain what is already sun-clear; and then anon, 
not without frankness, declare frequently enough 
that 'the Editor does not understand/ that 'the 
Editor cannot guess/ — while, for most part, the 
Reader cannot help both guessing and seeing. Thus, 
if Johnson say, in one sentence, that 'English 



O SAMUEL JOHNSON. 

names should not be used in Latin verses/ and 
then, in the next sentence, speak blamingly of 
' Carteret being used as a dactyl/ will the genera- 
lity of mortals detect any puzzle there ? Or again, 
where poor Boswell writes : c I always remember a 
' remark made to me by a Turkish lady, educated 
' in France : " Ma foi, monsieur, notre bonheur de- 
'pend de lafaqon que notre sang circule ;" ' — though 
the Turkish lady here speaks English-French, where 
is the call for a Note like this : ' Mr. Boswell no 
' doubt fancied these words had some meaning, or 
c he would hardly have quoted them : but what that 
' meaning is, the Editor cannot guess V The Edi- 
tor is clearly no witch at a riddle. — For these and 
all kindred deficiencies the excuse, as we said, is at 
hand ; but the fact of their existence is not the less 
certain and regretable. 

Indeed, it, from a very early stage of the busi- 
ness, becomes afflictively apparent, how much the 
Editor, so well furnished with all external appli- 
ances and means, is from within unfurnished with 
means for forming to himself any just notion of 
Johnson, or of Johnson's Life ; and therefore of 
speaking on that subject with much hope of edi- 
fying. Too lightly is it from the first taken for 
granted that Hunger, the great basis of our life, is 
also its apex and ultimate perfection; that as 
* Neediness and Greediness and Vainglory' are the 
chief qualities of most men, so no man, not even 
a Johnson, acts or can think of acting on any 



MR. CROKER S EDITION. 7 

other principle. Whatsoever, therefore, cannot be 
referred to the two former categories (Need and 
Greed) , is without scruple ranged under the latter. 
It is here properly that our Editor becomes bur- 
densome ; and, to the weaker sort, even a nuisance. 
c f What good is it/' will such cry, " when we had 
still some faint shadow of belief that man was 
better than a selfish Digesting-machine, what good 
is it to poke in, at every turn, and explain how this 
and that which we thought noble in old Samuel, 
was vulgar, base; that for him too there was no 
reality but in the Stomach ; and except Pudding, 
and the finer species of pudding which is named 
Praise, life had no pabulum ? Why, for instance, 
when we know that Johnson loved his good Wife, 
and says expressly that their marriage was ' a love- 
match on both sides/ — should two closed lips open 
to tell us only this : c Is it not possible that the ob- 
' vious advantage of having a woman of experience 
f to superintend an establishment of this kind (the 
* Edial School) may have contributed to a match so 
' disproportionate in point of age. — Ed.?' Or again 
when, in the Text, the honest cynic speaks freely 
of his former poverty, and it is known that he once 
lived on fourpence-halfpenny a-day, — need a Com- 
mentator advance, and comment thus : c When we 
f find Dr. Johnson tell unpleasant truths to, or of, 
f other men, let us recollect that he does not appear 
' to have spared himself, on occasions in which he 
c might be forgiven for doing so V Why in short/' 



8 SAMUEL JOHNSON, 

continues the exasperated Reader, " should Notes 
of this species stand affronting me, when there 
might have been no Note at all ?" — Gentle Reader, 
we answer, Be not wroth. What other could an 
honest Commentator do, than give thee the best he 
had ? Such was the picture and theorem he had 
fashioned for himself of the world and of man's 
doings therein : take it, and draw wise inferences 
from it. If there did exist a Leader of Public 
Opinion, and Champion of Orthodoxy in the Church 
of Jesus of Nazareth, who reckoned that man's 
glory consisted in not being poor ; and that a Sage, 
and Prophet of his time, must needs blush because 
the world had paid him at that easy rate of four- 
pence-halfpenny per diem, — was not the fact of such 
existence worth knowing, worth considering? 

Of a much milder hue, yet to us practically of 
an all-defacing, and for the present enterprise quite 
ruinous character, — is another grand fundamental 
failing; the last we shall feel ourselves obliged to 
take the pain of specifying here. It is, that our 
Editor has fatally, and almost surprisingly, mis- 
taken the limits of an Editor's function ; and so, 
instead of working on the margin with his Pen, to 
elucidate as best might be, strikes boldly into the 
body of the page with his Scissors, and there clips 
at discretion ! Four Books Mr. C. had by him, 
wherefrom to gather light for the fifth, which was 
Boswell's. What does he do but now, in the 
placidest manner, — slit the whole five into slips, 



and sew these together into a sextum quid, exactly 
at his own convenience ; giving Boswell the credit 
of the whole ! By what art-magic, our readers 
ask, has he united them ? By the simplest of all : 
by Brackets. Never before was the full virtue of 
the Bracket made manifest. You begin a sentence 
under BoswelFs guidance, thinking to be carried 
happily through it by the same : but no ; in the 
middle, perhaps after your semicolon, and some 
consequent ' for/— starts up one of these Bracket- 
ligatures, and stitches you in from half a page, 
to twenty or thirty pages of a Hawkins, Tyers, 
Murphy, Piozzi ; so that often one must make the 
old sad reflection, Where we are, we know ; whither 
we are going, no man knoweth ! It is truly said 
also, There is much between the cup and the lip ; 
but here the case is still sadder : for not till after 
consideration can you ascertain, now when the cup 
is at the lip, what liquor it is you are imbibing ; 
whether BoswelFs French wine which you began 
with, or some Piozzi's ginger-beer, or Hawkins's 
entire, or perhaps some other great Brewer's penny- 
swipes or even alegar, which has been surrepti- 
tiously substituted instead thereof. A situation 
almost original ; not to be tried a second time ! 
But, in fine, what ideas Mr. Croker entertains of 
a literary whole and the thing called Book, and 
how the very Printer's Devils did not rise in mu- 
tiny against such a conglomeration as this, and re- 
fuse to print it, — may remain a problem. 



10 SAMUEL JOHNSON. 

And now happily our say is said. All faults, the 
Moralists tell us, are properly shortcomings: crimes 
themselves are nothing other than a not doing 
enough; a fighting, but with defective vigour. How 
much more a mere insufficiency, and this after 
good efforts, in handicraft practice ! Mr. Croker 
says : ' The worst that can happen is that all the 
' present Editor has contributed may, if the reader 
' so pleases, be rejected as surplusage.' It is our 
pleasant duty to take, with hearty welcome, what 
he has given ; and render thanks even for what he 
meant to give. Next and finally, it is our painful 
duty to declare, aloud if that be necessary, that his 
gift, as weighed against the hard money which the 
Booksellers demand for giving it you, is (in our 
judgment) very greatly the lighter. No portion, 
accordingly, of our small floating capital has been 
embarked in the business, or shall ever be ; indeed, 
were we in the market for such a thing, there is 
simply no Edition of Boswell to which this last 
would seem preferable. And now enough, and 
more than enough ! 

We have next a word to say of James Boswell. 
Boswell has already been much commented upon ; 
but rather in the way of censure and vituperation, 
than of true recognition. He was a man that 
brought himself much before the world ; confessed 
that he eagerly coveted fame, or if that were not 
possible, notoriety; of which latter as he gained far 



BOSWELL. 11 

more than seemed his due, the public were incited, 
not only by their natural love of scandal, but by a 
special ground of envy, to say whatever ill of him 
could be said. Out of the fifteen millions that then 
lived, and had bed and board, in the British Islands, 
this man has provided us a greater pleasure than 
any other individual, at whose cost we now enjoy 
ourselves; perhaps has done us a greater service 
than can be specially attributed to more than two 
or three : yet, ungrateful that we are, no written or 
spoken eulogy of James Boswell anywhere exists ; 
his recompense in solid pudding (so far as copy- 
right went) was not excessive ; and as for the empty 
praise, it has altogether been denied him. Men 
are unwiser than children ; they do not know the 
hand that feeds them. 

Boswell was a person whose mean or bad quali- 
ties lay open to the general eye ; visible, palpable 
to the dullest. His good qualities, again, belonged 
not to the Time he lived in ; were far from com- 
mon then; indeed, in such a degree, were almost 
unexampled; not recognisable therefore by every 
one ; nay, apt even (so strange had they grown) to 
be confounded with the very vices they lay conti- 
guous to, and had sprung out of. That he was a 
wine-bibber and gross liver ; gluttonously fond of 
whatever would yield him a little solacement, were 
it only of a stomachic character, is undeniable 
enough. That he was vain, heedless, a babbler; 
had much of the sycophant, alternating with the 



12 SAMUEL JOHNSON. 

braggadocio, curiously spiced too with an all-per- 
vading dash of the coxcomb ; that lie gloried much 
when the Tailor, by a court-suit, had made a new 
man of him ; that he appeared at the Shakspeare 
Jubilee with a riband, imprinted ' Corsica Bos- 
well/ round his hat; and in short, if you will, 
lived no day of his life without doing and saying 
more than one pretentious ineptitude : all this un- 
happily is evident as the sun at noon. The very 
look of Boswell seems to have signified so much. 
In that cocked nose, cocked partly in triumph over 
his weaker fellow-creatures, partly to snuff up the 
smell of coming pleasure, and scent it from afar ; 
in those bag-cheeks, hanging like half-filled wine- 
skins, still able to contain more; in that coarsely 
protruded shelf-mouth, that fat dewlapped chin; 
in all this, who sees not sensuality, pretension, 
boisterous imbecility enough ; much that could not 
have been ornamental in the temper of a great 
man's overfed great man (what the Scotch name 
flunkey), though it had been more natural there? 
The under part of BoswelTs face is of a low, almost 
brutish character. 

Unfortunately, on the other hand, what great 
and genuine good lay in him was nowise so self- 
evident. That Boswell was a hunter after spiritual 
Notabilities, that he loved such, and longed, and 
even crept and crawled to be near them ; that he 
first (in old Touchwood AuchinlecVs phraseology) 
"took on with Paoli;" and then being off with 






BOSWELL. 13 

" the Corsican landlouper/' took on with, a school- 
master, "ane that keeped a schule, and ca'd it 
an academy:" that he did all this, and could not 
help doing it, we account a very singular merit. 
The man, once for all, had an 'open sense/ an 
open loving heart, which so few have : where Ex- 
cellence existed, he was compelled to acknowledge 
it ; was drawn towards it, and (let the old sulphur- 
brand of a Laird say what he liked) could not but 
walk with it, — if not as superior, if not as equal, 
then as inferior and lackey, better so than not at 
all. If we reflect now that this love of Excellence 
had not only such an evil nature to triumph over ; 
but also what an education and social position with- 
stood it and weighed it down, its innate strength, 
victorious over all these things, may astonish us. 
Consider what an inward impulse there must have 
been, how many mountains of impediment hurled 
aside, before the Scottish Laird could, as humble 
servant, embrace the knees (the bosom was not 
permitted him) of the English Dominie ! Your 
Scottish Laird, says an English naturalist of these 
days, may be defined as the hungriest and vainest 
of all bipeds yet known. Boswell too was a Tory ; 
of quite peculiarly feudal, genealogical, pragmatical 
temper; had been nurtured in an atmosphere of 
Heraldry, at the feet of a very Gamaliel in that 
kind ; within bare walls, adorned only with pedi- 
grees, amid serving-men in threadbare livery; all 
things teaching him, from birth upwards, to re- 



14 SAMUEL JOHNSON, 

member that a Laird was a Laird. Perhaps there 
was a special vanity in his very blood : old Auchin- 
leck had, if not the gay, tail-spreading, peacock 
vanity of his son, no little of the slow-stalking, 
contentions, hissing vanity of the gander ; a still 
more fatal species. Scottish Advocates will yet 
tell yon how the ancient man, having chanced to 
be the first sheriff appointed (after the abolition of 
c hereditary jurisdictions') by royal authority, was 
wont, in dull-snuffing pompous tone, to preface 
many a deliverance from the bench with these 
words : " I, the first King's Sheriff in Scotland." 
And now behold the worthy Bozzy, so prepos- 
sessed and held back by nature and by art, fly 
nevertheless like iron to its magnet, whither his 
better genius called ! You may surround the 
iron and the magnet with what enclosures and 
encumbrances you please, — with wood, with rub- 
bish, with brass : it matters not, the two feel each 
other, they struggle restlessly towards each other, 
they will be together. The iron may be a Scottish 
squirelet, full of gulosity and ' gigmanity**;' the 
magnet an English plebeian, and moving rag-and- 
dust mountain, coarse, proud, irascible, imperious : 
nevertheless, behold how they embrace, and inse- 
parably cleave to one another ! It is one of the 

* c Q. What do you mean by "respectable?" — A, He always 
'kept a gig.' (ThwrtelVs Trial) — 'Thus,' it has been said, 'does 
e society naturally divide itself into four classes : Noblemen, 
£ Gentlemen, Grigmen, and Men.' 



BOSWELL. 15 

strangest phenomena t of the past century, that at 
a time when the old reverent feeling of Disciple- 
ship (such as brought men from far countries, with 
rich gifts, and prostrate soul, to the feet of the 
Prophets) had passed utterly away from men's 
practical experience, and was no longer surmised 
to exist (as it does), perennial, indestructible, in 
man's inmost heart, — James Boswell should have 
been the individual, of all others, predestined to 
recall it, in such singular guise, to the wondering, 
and, for a long while, laughing and unrecognising 
world. It has been commonly said, The man's 
vulgar vanity was all that attached him to John- 
son; he delighted to be seen near him, to be 
thought connected with him. Now let it be at 
once granted that no consideration springing out 
of vulgar vanity could well be absent from the 
mind of James Boswell, in this his intercourse with 
Johnson, or in any considerable transaction of his 
life. At the same time, ask yourself: Whether 
such vanity, and nothing else, actuated him there- 
in; whether this was the true essence and moving 
principle of the phenomenon, or not rather its 
outward vesture, and the accidental environment 
(and defacement) in which it came to light ? The 
man was, by nature and habit, vain ; a sycophant- 
coxcomb, be it granted: but had there been no- 
thing more than vanity in him, was Samuel John- 
son the man of men to whom he must attach 
himself? At the date when Johnson was a poor 



16 SAMUEL JOHNSON. 

rusty-coated ' scholar/ dwelling in Temple-lane, 
and indeed throughout their whole intercourse 
afterwards, were there not chancellors and prime 
ministers enough; graceful gentlemen, the glass 
of fashion; honour-giving noblemen; dinner-giv- 
ing rich men; renowned fire-eaters, swordsmen, 
gownsmen; Quacks and Realities of all hues, — 
any one of whom bulked much larger in the world's 
eye than Johnson ever did ? To any one of whom, 
by half that submissiveness and assiduity, our 
Bozzy might have recommended himself ; and have 
sat there, the envy of surrounding lickspittles; 
pocketing now solid emolument, swallowing now 
well-cooked viands and wines of rich vintage ; in 
each case, also, shone on by some glittering reflex 
of Renown or Notoriety, so as to be the observed 
of innumerable observers. To no one of whom, 
however, though otherwise a most diligent solicitor 
and purveyor, did he so attach himself : such vul- 
gar courtierships were his paid drudgery, or leisure 
amusement ; the worship of Johnson was his grand, 
ideal, voluntary business. Does not the frothy- 
hearted yet enthusiastic man, doffing his Advo- 
cate's- wig, regularly take post, and hurry up to 
London, for the sake of his Sage chiefly; as to a 
Feast of Tabernacles, the Sabbath of his whole 
year ? The plate-licker and wine-bibber dives into 
Bolt Court, to sip muddy coffee with a cynical 
old man, and a sour-tempered blind old woman 
(feeling the cups, whether they are full, with her 



BOSWELL. 17 

finger) ; and patiently endures contradictions with- 
out end; too happy so he may but be allowed to 
listen and live. Nay, it does not appear that vul- 
gar vanity could ever have been much flattered by 
BoswelPs relation to Johnson. Mr. Croker says, 
Johnson was, to the last, little regarded by the 
great world; from which, for a vulgar vanity, all 
honour, as from its fountain, descends. Bozzy, 
even among Johnson' s friends and special admirers, 
seems rather to have been laughed at than envied : 
his officious, whisking, consequential ways, the 
daily reproofs and rebuffs he underwent, could gain 
from the world no golden but only leaden opinions. 
His devout Discipleship seemed nothing more than 
a mean Spanielship, in the general eye. His 
mighty ' constellation/ or sun, round whom he, as 
satellite, observantly gyrated, was, for the mass of 
men, but a huge ill-snuffed tallow-light, and he a 
weak night-moth, circling foolishly, dangerously 
about it, not knowing what he wanted. If he en- 
joyed Highland dinners and toasts, as henchman 
to a new sort of chieftain, Henry Erskine, in the 
domestic c Outer-House/ could hand him a shilling 
" for the sight of his Bear." Doubtless the man 
was laughed at, and often heard himself laughed 
at, for his Johnsonism. To be envied is the grand 
and sole aim of vulgar vanity; to be filled with 
good things is that of sensuality : for Johnson 
perhaps no man living envied poor Bozzy ; and of 
good things (except himself paid for them) there 



18 SAMUEL JOHNSON. 

was no vestige in that acquaintanceship. Had no- 
thing other or better than vanity and sensuality- 
been there, Johnson and Boswell had never come 
together, or had soon and finally separated again. 

In fact, the so copious terrestrial dross that 
welters chaotically, as the outer sphere of this 
man's character, does but render for us more re- 
markable, more touching, the celestial spark of 
goodness, of light, and Reverence for "Wisdom, 
which dwelt in the interior, and could struggle 
through such encumbrances, and in some degree 
illuminate and beautify them. There is much 
lying yet undeveloped in the love of Boswell for 
Johnson. A cheering proof, in a time which else 
utterly wanted and still wants such, that living 
Wisdom is quite infinitely precious to man, is the 
symbol of the Godlike to him, which even weak 
eyes may discern; that Loyalty, Discipleship, all 
that was ever meant by Hero-worship, lives per- 
ennially in the human bosom, and waits, even in 
these dead days, only for occasions to unfold it, 
and inspire all men with it, and again make the 
world alive ! James Boswell we can regard as a 
practical witness, or real martyr, to this high ever- 
lasting truth. A wonderful martyr, if you will; 
and in a time which made such martyrdom doubly 
wonderful : yet the time and its martyr perhaps 
suited each other. For a decrepit, death-sick Era, 
when Cant had first decisively opened her poisoH- 
breathing lips to proclaim that God- worship and 






BOSWELL. 19 

Mammon-worship were one and the same,, that Life 
was a Lie, and the Earth Beelzebub' s, which the 
Supreme Quack should inherit; and so all things 
were fallen into the yellow leaf, and fast hastening 
to noisome corruption: for such an Era, perhaps 
no better Prophet than a parti-coloured Zany-Pro- 
phet, concealing, from himself and others, his pro- 
phetic significance in such unexpected vestures, — 
was deserved, or would have been in place. A pre- 
cious medicine lay hidden in floods of coarsest, 
most composite treacle : the world swallowed the 
treacle, for it suited the world's palate ; and now, 
after half a century, may the medicine also begin 
to shew itself! James Boswell belonged, in his 
corruptible part, to the lowest classes of mankind ; 
a foolish, inflated creature, swimming in an ele- 
ment of self-conceit : but in his corruptible there 
dwelt an incorruptible, all the more impressive and 
indubitable for the strange lodging it had taken. 

Consider too, with what force, diligence and 
vivacity he has rendered back all this which, in 
Johnson's neighbourhood, his ' open sense' had so 
eagerly and freely taken in. That loose-flowing, 
careless-looking Work of his is as a picture by one 
of Nature's own Artists; the best possible resem- 
blance of a Reality ; like the very image thereof in 
a clear mirror. Which indeed it was : let but the 
mirror be clear, this is the great point ; the picture 
must and will be genuine. How the babbling 
Bozzy, inspired only by love, and the recognition 



20 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 






and vision which love can lend, epitomises nightly 
the words of Wisdom, the deeds and aspects of 
Wisdom, and so, by little and little, unconsciously 
works together for us a whole Johnsoniad; a more 
free, perfect, sunlit and spirit-speaking likeness, 
than for many centuries had been drawn by man 
of man ! Scarcely since the days of Homer has 
the feat been equalled ; indeed, in many senses, this 
also is a kind of Heroic Poem. The fit Odyssey 
of our unheroic age was to be written, not sung; 
of a Thinker, not of a Fighter ; and (for want of a 
Homer) by the first open soul that might offer, — 
looked such even through the organs of a Boswell. 
We do the man's intellectual endowment great 
wrong, if we measure it by its mere logical out- 
come ; though here too, there is not wanting a light 
ingenuity, a figurativeness and fanciful sport, with 
glimpses of insight far deeper than the common. 
But Boswell's grand intellectual talent was, as 
such ever is, an unconscious one, of far higher reach 
and significance than Logic ; and shewed itself in 
the whole, not in parts. Here again we have that 
old saying verified, ' The heart sees farther than 
the head/ 

Thus does poor Bozzy stand out to us as an ill- 
assorted, glaring mixture of the highest and the 
lowest. What, indeed, is man's life generally but 
a kind of beast-godhood ; the god in us triumphing 
more and more over the beast ; striving more and 
more to subdue it under his feet ? Did not the 



BOSWELL. 21 

Ancients, in their wise, perennially significant way, 
figure Nature itself, their sacred All, or Pan, as a 
portentous commingling of these two discords ; as 
musical, humane, oracular in its upper part, yet 
ending below in the cloven hairy feet of a goat ? 
The union of melodious, celestial Freewill and 
Reason with fold Irrationality and Lust ; in which, 
nevertheless, dwelt a mysterious unspeakable Fear 
and half-mad panic Awe ; as for mortals there well 
might ! And is not man a microcosm, or epito- 
mised mirror of that same Universe ; or rather, is 
not that Universe even Himself, the reflex of his 
own fearful and wonderful being, 'the waste fan- 
tasy of his own dream V No wonder that man 
that each man, and James Boswell like the others, 
should resemble it ! The pecidiarity in his case 
was the unusual defect of amalgamation and sub- 
ordination : the highest lay side by side with the 
lowest ; not morally combined with it and spiritu- 
ally transfiguring it, but tumbling in half-mecha- 
nical juxtaposition with it, and from time to time, 
as the mad alternation chanced, irradiating it, or 
eclipsed by it. 

The world, as we said, has been but unjust to 
him ; discerning only the outer terrestrial and often 
sordid mass.; without eye, as it generally is, for his 
inner divine secret ; and thus figuring him nowise 
as a god Pan, but simply of the bestial species, 
like the cattle on a thousand hills. Nay, some- 
times a strange enough hypothesis has been started 



22 SAMUEL JOHNSON. 

of him ; as if it were in virtue even of these same 
bad qualities that he did his good work ; as if it 
were the very fact of his being among the worst 
men in this world that had enabled him to write 
one of the best books therein ! Falser hypothesis, 
we may venture to say, never rose in human soul. 
Bad is by its nature negative, and can do nothing ; 
whatsoever enables us to do anything is by its very 
nature good. Alas, that there should be teachers 
in Israel, or even learners, to whom this world- 
ancient fact is still problematical, or even deniable ! 
Boswell wrote a good Book because he had a heart 
and an eye to discern Wisdom, and an utterance 
to render it forth ; because of his free insight, his 
lively talent, above all, of his Love and childlike 
Open-mindedness. His sneaking sycophancies, 
his greediness and forwardness, whatever was bes- 
tial and earthy in him, are so many blemishes in 
his Book, which still disturb us in its clearness ; 
wholly hindrances, not helps. Towards Johnson, 
however, his feeling was not Sycophancy, which is 
the lowest, but Reverence, which is the highest of 
human feelings. None but a reverent man (which 
so unspeakably few are) could have found his way 
from BoswelFs environment to Johnson's : if such 
worship for real God-made superiors shewed itself 
also as worship for apparent Tailor-made superiors, 
even as hollow interested mouth- worship for such, 
— the case, in this composite human nature of ours, 
was not miraculous, the more was the pity ! But 



BOSWELL. 23 

for ourselves, let every one of us cling to this last 
article of Faith, and know it as the beginning of 
all knowledge worth the name : That neither James 
BoswelPs good Book, nor any other good thing, in 
any time or in any place, was, is or can be per- 
formed by any man in virtue of his badness, but 
always and solely in spite thereof. 

As for the Book itself, questionless the universal 
favour entertained for it is well merited. In worth 
as a Book we have rated it beyond any other pro- 
duct of the eighteenth century : all Johnson* s own 
Writings, laborious and in their kind genuine above 
most^ stand on a quite inferior level to it ; already, 
indeed, they are becoming obsolete for this gene- 
ration; and for some future generation may be 
valuable chiefly as Prolegomena and expository 
Scholia to this Johnsoniad of Boswell. Which of 
us but remembers, as one of the sunny spots in 
his existence, the day when he opened these airy 
volumes, fascinating him by a true natural magic ! 
It was as if the curtains of the Past were drawn 
aside, and we looked mysteriously into a kindred 
country, where dwelt our Fathers; inexpressibly 
dear to us, but which had seemed forever hidden 
from our eyes. For the dead Night had engulfed 
it ; all was gone, vanished as if it had not been. 
Nevertheless, wondrously given back to us, there 
once more it lay; all bright, lucid, blooming; a 
little island of Creation amid the circumambient 
Void. There it still lies ; like a thing stationary, 



24 SAMUEL JOHNSON. 

imperishable, over which changeful Time were now 
accumulating itself in vain, and could not, any 
longer, harm it, or hide it. 

If we examine by what charm it is that men 
are still held to this Life of Johnson, now when so 
much else has been forgotten, the main part of the 
answer will perhaps be found in that speculation 
c on the import of Reality / communicated to the 
world, last month, in this Magazine. " The John- 
sohiad of Boswell turns on objects that in very 
deed existed ; it is all true. So far other in me- 
lodiousness of tone, it vies with the Odyssey, or 
surpasses it, in this one point : to us these read 
pages, as those chaunted hexameters were to the 
first Greek hearers, are in the fullest, deepest sense 
wholly credible. All the wit and wisdom lying 
embalmed in Boswell' s Book, plenteous as these 
are, could not have saved it. Far more scientific 
instruction (mere excitement and enlightenment of 
the thinking power) can be found in twenty other 
works of that time, which make but a quite se- 
condary impression on us. The other works of 
that time, however, fall under one of two classes : 
Either they are professedly Didactic ; and, in that 
way, mere Abstractions, Philosophic Diagrams, in- 
capable of interesting us much otherwise than as 
Euclid's Elements may do : Or else, with all their 
vivacity, and pictorial richness of colour, they are 
Fictions and not Realities. Deep truly, as Herr 
Sauerteig urges, is the force of this consideration : 



BOSWELL. 



25 



The thing here stated is a fact ; these figures, that 
local habitation, are not shadow but substance. In 
virtue of such advantages, see how a very Boswell 
may become Poetical ! 

Critics insist much on the Poet that he should 
communicate an ' Infinitude' to his delineation; 
that by intensity of conception, by that gift of 
'transcendental Thought/ which is fitly named 
genius, and inspiration, he should inform the Finite 
with a certain Infinitude of significance ; or as they 
sometimes say, ennoble the Actual into Idealness. 
They are right in their precept ; they mean rightly. 
But in cases like this of the Johnsoniad, such is 
the dark grandeur of that ' Time-element/ wherein 
man's soul here below lives imprisoned, — the Poet's 
task is, as it were, done to his hand : Time itself, 
which is the outer veil of Eternity, invests, of its 
own accord, with an authentic, felt 'infinitude/ 
whatsoever it has once embraced in its mysterious 
folds. Consider all that lies in that one word, Past ! 
What a pathetic, sacred, in every sense poetic, 
meaning is implied in it ; a meaning growing ever 
the clearer, the farther we recede in Time, — the 
more of that same Past we have to look through ! 
— On which ground indeed must Sauerteig have 
built, and not without plausibility, in that strange 
thesis of his : e That History, after all, is the true 
'Poetry; that Reality, if rightly interpreted, is 
' grander than Fiction ; nay, that even in the right 
' interpretation of Reality and History does genuine 
c Poetry consist.' 



26 SAMUEL JOHNSON. 

Thus for BoswelVs Life of Johnson lias Time 
done, is Time still doing, what no ornament of Art 
or Artifice could have done for it. Rough Samuel 
and sleek wheedling James were, and are not. 
Their Life and whole personal Environment has 
melted into air. The Mitre Tavern still stands 
in Fleet Street : but where now is its scot-and-lot 
paying, beef-and-ale loving, cocked-hatted, pot- 
bellied Landlord; its rosy-faced assiduous Land- 
lady, with all her shining brass-pans, waxed tables, 
well-filled larder-shelves; her cooks, and bootjacks, 
and errand-boys, and watery-mouthed hangers- 
on ? Gone ! Gone ! The becking waiter who, with 
wreathed smiles, was wont to spread for Samuel 
and Bozzy their supper of the gods, has long since 
pocketed his last sixpence ; and vanished, sixpences 
and all, like a ghost at cock-crowing. The Bottles 
they drank out of are all broken, the Chairs they 
sat on all rotted and burnt ; the very Knives and 
Forks they ate with have rusted to the heart, and 
become brown oxide of iron, and mingled with the 
indiscriminate clay. All, all has vanished ; in very 
deed and truth, like that baseless fabric of Pro- 
sperous air-vision. Of the Mitre Tavern nothing 
but the bare walls remain there : of London, of 
England, of the World, nothing but the bare walls 
remain; and these also decaying (were they of 
adamant), only slower. The mysterious River of 
Existence rushes on : a new Billow thereof has 
arrived, and lashes wildly as ever round the old 



BOSWELL. , 27 

embankments ; but the former Billow with its loud, 
mad eddyings, where is it ? — Where ! — Now this 
Book of BoswelPs, this is precisely a revocation 
of the edict of Destiny; so that Time shall not 
utterly, not so soon by several centuries, have 
dominion over us. A little row of Naphtha-lamps, 
with its line of Naphtha-light, burns clear and holy 
through the dead Night of the Past : they who 
are gone are still here; though hidden they are 
revealed, though dead they yet speak. There it 
shines, that little miraculously lamplit Pathway; 
shedding its feebler and feebler twilight into the 
boundless dark Oblivion, — for all that our Johnson 
touched has become illuminated for us : on which 
miraculous little Pathway we can still travel, and 
see wonders. 

It is not speaking with exaggeration, but with 
strict measured sobriety, to say that this Book of 
BoswelPs will give us more real insight into the 
History of England during those days than twenty 
other Books, falsely entitled ' Histories/ which 
take to themselves that special aim. What good 
is it to me though innumerable Smolletts and Bel- 
shams keep dinning in my ears that a man named 
George the Third was born and bred up, and a man 
named George the Second died ; that Walpole and 
the Pelhams, and Chatham, and Rockingham, and 
Shelburne, and North, with their Coalition or their 
Separation Ministries, all ousted one another ; and 
vehemently scrambled for 'the thing they called 



28 SAMUEL JOHNSON. 

the Rudder of Government, but which was in 
reality the Spigot of Taxation?' That debates 
were held, and infinite jarring and jargoning took 
place ; and road-bills and enclosure-bills, and game- 
bills and India-bills, and Laws which no man can 
number, which happily few men needed to trouble 
their heads with beyond the passing moment, were 
enacted, and printed by the King's Stationer? 
That he who sat in Chancery, and rayed out spe- 
culation from the Woolsack, was now a man that 
squinted, now a man that did not squint ? To the 
hungry and thirsty mind all this avails next to 
nothing. These men and these things, we indeed 
know, did swim, by strength or by specific levity, 
as apples or as horse-dung, on the top of the cur- 
rent : but is it by painfully noting the courses, 
eddyings and bobbings hither and thither of such 
drift-articles, that you will unfold to me the nature 
of the current itself; of that mighty-rolling, loud- 
roaring Life-current, bottomless as the foundations 
of the Universe, mysterious as its Author? The 
thing I want to see is not Redhook Lists, and 
Court Calendars, and Parliamentary Registers, but 
the Life of Man in England: what men did, 
thought, suffered, enjoyed; the form, especially the 
spirit, of their terrestrial existence, its outward en- 
vironment, its inward principle ; hoiv and what it 
was ; whence it proceeded, whither it was tending. 
Mournful, in truth, is it to behold what the 
business called c History/ in these so enlightened 



BOSWELL. 29 

and illuminated times, still continues to be. Can 
you gather from it, read till your eyes go out, any 
dimmest shadow of an answer to that great ques- 
tion : How men lived and had their being ; were it 
but economically, as what wages they got, and what 
they bought with these ? Unhappily you cannot. 
History will throw no light on any such matter. 
At the point where living memory fails, it is all 
darkness; Mr. Senior and Mr. Sadler have still to 
debate this simplest of all elements in the condi- 
tion of the Past : Whether men were better off, in 
their mere larders and pantries, or were worse off* 
than now ! History, as it stands all bound up in 
gilt volumes, is but a shade more instructive than 
the wooden volumes of a Backgammon-board. 
How my Prime Minister was appointed is of less 
moment to me than How my House Servant was 
hired. In these days, ten ordinary Histories of 
Kings and Courtiers were well exchanged against 
the tenth part of one good History of Booksellers. 
For example, I would fain know the History of 
Scotland: who can tell it me? "Robertson," 
say innumerable voices; " Robertson against the 
world." I open Robertson ; and find there, through 
long ages too confused for narrative, and fit only 
to be presented in the way of epitome and distilled 
essence, a cunning answer and hypothesis, not to 
this question : By whom, and by what means, when 
and how, was this fair broad Scotland, with its 
Arts and Manufactures, Temples, Schools, Institu- 



30 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 



tions, Poetry, Spirit, National Character, created, 
and made arable, verdant, peculiar, great, here as 
I can see some fair section of it lying, kind and 
strong (like some Bacchus-tamed Lion), from the 
Castle-hill of Edinburgh ? — but to this other ques- 
tion : How did the King keep himself alive in those 
old days; and restrain so many Butcher-Barons 
and ravenous Henchmen from utterly extirpating 
one another, so that killing went on in some sort 
of moderation ? In the one little Letter of iEneas 
Sylvius, from old Scotland, there is more of History 
than in all this. — At length, however, we come to 
a luminous age, of lasting importance, and full of 
interest for us; to the age of the Reformation. All 
Scotland is awakened to a second higher life ; the 
Spirit of the Highest stirs in every bosom, agitates 
every bosom; Scotland is convulsed, fermenting, 
struggling to body itself forth anew. To the herds- 
man, among his cattle in remote woods; to the 
craftsman, in his rude, heath-thatched workshop, 
among his rude guild-brethren ; to the great and 
to the little, a new light has arisen : in town and 
hamlet groups are gathered, with eloquent looks, 
and governed or ungovernable tongues ; the great 
and the little go forth together to do battle for 
the Lord against the mighty. We ask, with breath- 
less eagerness : How was it; how went it on ? Let 
us understand it, let us see it, and know it ! — In 
reply, is handed us a really graceful and most dainty 
little Scandalous Chronicle (as for some Journal 



BOSWELL. 31 

of Fashion) of two persons : Mary Stuart, a Beauty, 
but over lightheaded ; and Henry Darnley, a Booby 
who had fine legs. How these first courted, billed 
and cooed, according to nature; then pouted, 
fretted, grew utterly enraged, and blew one another 
up with gunpowder : this, and not the History of 
Scotland, is what we goodnaturedly read. Nay, by 
other hands, something like a horseload of other 
Books have been written to prove that it was the 
Beauty who blew up the Booby, and that it was 
not she. Who or what it was, the thing once for 
all being so effectually done, concerns us little. To 
know Scotland, at that great epoch, were a valuable 
increase of knowledge : to know poor Darnley, and 
see him with burning candle, from centre to skin, 
were no increase of knowledge at all.— Thus is 
History written. 

Hence, indeed, comes it that History, which 
should be c the essence of innumerable Biographies/ 
will tell us, question it as we like, less than one 
genuine Biography may do, pleasantly and of its 
own accord ! The time is approaching when Hi4» • 
story will be attempted on quite other principles ; 
when the Court, the Senate, and the Battlefield, 
receding more and more into the background, the 
Temple, the Workshop and Social Hearth will ad- 
vance more and more into the foreground; and 
History will not content itself with shaping some 
answer to that question : How were men taxed and. 
kept quiet then ? but will seek to answer this other 



32 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 



infinitely wider and higher question : How and what 
were men then ? Not our Government only, or the 
' House wherein our life was led/ but the Life itself 
we led there, will be inquired into. Of which 
latter it may be found that Government, in any 
modern sense of the word, is after all but a secon- 
dary condition: in the mere sense of Taxation and 
Keeping quiet, a small, almost ( a pitiful one. — Mean- 
while let us welcome such Boswells, each in his 
degree, as bring us any genuine contribution, were 
it never so inadequate, so inconsiderable. 

An exception was early taken against this Life of 
Johnson, and all similar enterprises, which we here 
recommend; and has been transmitted from critic 
to critic, and repeated in their several dialects, un-; 
interruptedly, ever since : That such jottings down 
of careless conversation are an infringement of 
social privacy ; a crime against our highest Free- 
dom, the Freedom of man's intercourse with man. 
To this accusation, which we have read and heard 
oftener than enough, might it not be well for once 
to offer the flattest contradiction, and plea of Not 
at all guilty? Not that conversation is noted 
down, but that conversation should not deserve 
noting down, is the evil. Doubtless, if conversa- 
tion be falsely recorded, then is it simply a Lie ; 
and worthy of being swept, with all despatch, to 
the Father of Lies. But if, on the other hand, 
conversation can be authentically recorded, and 
any one is ready for the task, let him by all means 









BOSWELL. 3S 

proceed with it ; let conversation be kept in remem- 
brance to the latest date possible. Nay, should 
the consciousness that a man may be among us 
' taking notes } tend, in any measure, to restrict 
those floods of idle insincere speech, with which the 
thought of mankind is wellnigh drowned, — were it 
other than the most indubitable benefit ? He who 
speaks honestly cares not, needs not care, though 
his words be preserved to remotest time : for him 
who speaks dishonestly, the fittest of all punish- 
ments seems to be this same, which the nature of 
the case provides. The dishonest speaker, not he 
only who purposely utters falsehoods, but he who 
does not purposely, and with sincere heart, utter 
Truth, and Truth alone ; who babbles he knows not 
what, and has clapped no bridle on his tongue, but 
lets it run racket, ejecting chatter and futility, — is 
among the most indisputable malefactors omitted, 
or inserted, in the Criminal Calendar. To him 
that will well consider it, idle speaking is precisely 
the beginning of all Hollowness, Halfness, Infidelity 
(want of Faithfulness) ; the genial atmosphere in 
which rank weeds of every kind attain the mastery 
over noble fruits in man's life, and utterly choke 
them out : one of the most crying maladies of these 
days, and to be testified against, and in all ways to 
the uttermost withstood. Wise, of a wisdom far 
beyond our shallow depth, was that old precept : 
Watch thy tongue ; out of it are the issues of Life ! 
c Man is properly an incarnated word :' the word 



34 SAMUEL JOHNSON. 

that lie speaks is the man himself. "Were eyes put 
into our head, that we might see; or only that we 
might fancy, and plausibly pretend, we had seen ? 
Was the tongue suspended there, that it might tell 
truly what we had seen, and make man the souFs- 
brother of man ; or only that it might utter vain 
sounds, jargon, soul-confusing, and so divide man, 
as by enchanted walls of Darkness, from union with 
man ? Thou who wearest that cunning, heaven- 
made organ, a Tongue, think well of this. Speak 
not, I passionately entreat thee, till thy thought 
have silently matured itself, till thou have other 
than mad and mad-making noises to emit : hold 
thy tongue (thou hast it a-holding) till some mean- 
ing lie behind, to set it wagging. Consider the 
significance of Silence : it is boundless, never by 
meditating to be exhausted; unspeakably profitable 
to thee ! Cease that chaotic hubbub, wherein thy 
own soul runs to waste, to confused suicidal dis- 
location and stupor : out of Silence comes thy 
strength. c Speech is silvern, Silence is golden; 
Speech is human, Silence is divine/ Fool ! thinkest 
thou that because no Boswell is there with ass- 
skin and blacklead to note thy jargon, it therefore 
dies and is harmless ? Nothing dies, nothing can 
die. No idlest word thou speakest but is a seed 
cast into Time, and grows through all Eternity ! 
The Recording Angel, consider it well, is no fable, 
but the truest of truths : the paper tablets thou 
canst burn ; but of the ( iron leaf there is no burn- 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 35 

Ing. — Truly, if we can permit God Almighty to note 
down our conversation, thinking it good enough 
for Him, — any poor Boswell need not scruple to 
work his will of it. 

Leaving now this our English Odyssey, with its 
Singer and Scholiast, let us come to the Ulysses ; 
that great Samuel Johnson himself, the far-expe- 
rienced, ' much-enduring man/ whose labours and 
pilgrimage are here sung. A fall-length image of 
his Existence has been preserved for us : and he, 
perhaps of all living Englishmen, was the one who 
best deserved that honour. For if it is true, and 
now almost proverbial, that the Life of the lowest 
mortal, if faithfully recorded, would be interesting 
to the highest ; how much more when the mortal 
in question was already distinguished in fortune 
and natural quality, so that his thinkings and 
doings were not significant of himself only, but of 
large masses of mankind ! c There is not a man 
whom I meet on the streets/ says one, 'but I 
could like, were it otherwise convenient, to know 
his Biography : } nevertheless, could an enlightened 
curiosity be so far gratified, it must be owned the 
Biography of most ought to be, in an extreme 
degree, summary. In this world, there is so won- 
derfully little self- subsistence among men • next to 
no originality (though never absolutely none) : one 
Life is too servilely the copy of another ; and so 
in whole thousands of them you find little that is 



36 SAMUEL JOHNSON. 

properly new ; nothing but the old song sung by a 
new voice, with better or worse execution, here and 
there an ornamental quaver, and false notes enough: 
but the fundamental tune is ever the same ; and 
for the words, these, all that they meant stands 
written generally on the Churchyard- stone : Natus 
sum ; esuriebam, queer ebam ; nunc repletus requiesco. 
Mankind sail their Life-voyage in huge fleets, fol- 
lowing some single whale-fishing or herring-fishing 
Commodore : the logbook of each differs not, in 
essential purport, from that of any other ; nay the 
most have no legible logbook (reflection, observa- 
tion not being among their talents) ; keep no reck- 
oning, only keep in sight of the flagship, — and fish. 
Read the Commodore's Papers (know his Life) ; 
and even your lover of that street Biography will 
have learned the most of what he sought after. 

Or, the servile imitancy, and yet also a nobler 
relationship and mysterious union to one another 
which lies in such imitancy, of Mankind might be 
illustrated under the different figure, itself nowise 
original, of a Flock of Sheep. Sheep go in flocks 
for three reasons : First, because they are of a gre- 
garious temper, and love to be together : Secondly, 
because of their cowardice; they are afraid to 
be left alone : Thirdly, because the common run 
of them are dull of sight, to a proverb, and can 
have no choice in roads; sheep can in fact see 
nothing; in a celestial Luminary, and a scoured 
pewter Tankard, they would discern only that both 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 37 

dazzled them, and were of unspeakable glory. 
How like their fellow-creatures of the human 
species ! Men too, as was from the first main- 
tained here, are gregarious; then surely faint- 
hearted enough, trembling to be left by themselves ; 
above all, dull-sighted, down to the verge of utter 
blindness. Thus are we seen ever running in tor- 
rents, and mobs, if we run at all ; and after what 
foolish scoured Tankards, mistaking them for Suns ! 
Foolish Turnip-lanterns likewise, to all appearance 
supernatural, keep whole nations quaking, their 
hair on end. Neither know we, except by blind 
habit, where the good pastures lie : solely when the 
sweet grass is between our teeth, we know it, and 
chew it ; also when grass is bitter and scant, we 
know it, — and bleat and butt : these last two facts 
we know of a truth and in very deed. Thus do 
Men and Sheep play their parts on this Nether 
Earth ; wandering restlessly in large masses, they 
know not whither ; for most part, each following 
his neighbour, and his own nose. 

Nevertheless, not always ; look better, you shall 
find certain that do, in some small degree, know 
whither. Sheep have their Bell-wether; some 
ram of the folds, endued with more valour, with 
clearer vision than other sheep; he leads them 
through the wolds, by height and hollow, to the 
woods and watercourses, for covert or for pleasant 
provender ; courageously marching, and if need be 
leaping, and with hoof and horn doing battle, in 



38 SAMUEL JOHNSON. 

the van : him they courageously and with assured 
heart follow. Touching it is, as every herdsman 
will inform you, with what chivalrous devotedness 
these woolly Hosts adhere to their Wether ; and 
rush after him, through good report and through 
bad report, were it into safe shelters and green 
thy my nooks, or into asphaltic lakes and the jaws 
of devouring lions. Ever also must we recall that 
fact which we owe Jean Paul's quick eye : c If you 
' hold a stick before the Wether, so that he, by ne- 
c cessity, leaps in passing you, and then withdraw 
' your stick, the Flock will nevertheless all leap as 
' he did ; and the thousandth sheep shall be found 
( impetuously vaulting over air, as the first did over 
c an otherwise impassable barrier/ Reader, wouldst 
thou understand Society, ponder well those ovine 
proceedings ; thou wilt find them all curiously sig- 
nificant. 

Now if sheep always, how much more must 
men always, have their Chief, their Guide ! Man 
too is by nature quite thoroughly gregarious : nay, 
ever he struggles to be something more, to be 
social ; not even when Society has become impos- 
sible, does that deep-seated tendency and effort 
forsake him. Man, as if by miraculous magic, im- 
parts his Thoughts, his Mood of mind to man ; an 
unspeakable communion binds all past, present and 
future men into one indissoluble whole, almost 
into one living individual. Of which high, my- 
sterious Truth, this disposition to imitate> to lead 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 39 

and be led, this impossibility not to imitate, is the 
most constant, and one of the simplest manifesta- 
tions. To imitate ! which of us all can measure 
the significance that lies in that one word ? By 
virtue of which the infant Man, born at Wools- 
thorpe, grows up not to be a hairy Savage and 
chewer of Acorns, but an Isaac Newton and Dis- 
coverer of Solar Systems !— Thus both in a celes- 
tial and terrestrial sense are we a Flock, such as 
there is no other : nay, looking away from the base 
and ludicrous to the sublime and sacred side of the 
matter (since in every matter there are two sides), 
have not we also a Shepherd, 'if we will but hear 
his voice V Of those stupid multitudes there is 
no one but has an immortal Soul within him ; a 
reflex, and living image of God's whole Universe : 
strangely, from its dim environment, the light of 
the Highest looks through him; — for which rea- 
son, indeed, it is that we claim a brotherhood with 
him, and so love to know his History, and come 
into clearer and clearer union with all that he feels, 
and says, and does. 

However, the chief thing to be noted was this : 
Amid those dull millions, who, as a dull flock, roll 
hither and thither, whithersoever they are led ; and 
seem all sightless and slavish, accomplishing, at- 
tempting little save what the animal instinct in its 
somewhat higher kind might teach, To keep them- 
selves and their young ones alive, — are scattered 
here and there superior natures, whose eye is not 



40 SAMUEL JOHNSON. 

destitute of free vision, nor their heart of free vo- 
lition. These latter, therefore, examine and deter- 
mine, not what others do, but what it is right to 
do ; towards which, and which only, will they, with 
such force as is given them, resolutely endeavour : 
for if the Machine, living or inanimate, is merely 
fed, or desires to be fed, and so works ; the Person 
can will, and so do. These are properly our Men, 
our Great Men; the guides of the dull host, — 
which follows them as by an irrevocable decree. 
They are the chosen of the world : they had this 
rare faculty not only of ' supposing' and ' inclining 
to think/ but of knowing and believing ; the nature 
of their being was, that they lived not by Hear- 
say, but by clear Vision ; while others hovered and 
swam along, in the grand Vanity-fair of the World, 
blinded by the mere Shows of things, these saw 
into the Things themselves, and could walk as men 
having an eternal loadstar, and with their feet on 
sure paths. Thus was there a Reality in their 
existence ; something of a perennial character ; in 
virtue of which indeed it is that the memory of 
them is perennial. Whoso belongs only to his 
own age, and reverences only its gilt Popinjays or 
soot-smeared Mumboj umbos, must needs die with 
it : though he have been crowned seven times in 
the Capitol, or seventy and seven times, and Ru- 
mour have blown his praises to all the four winds, 
deafening every ear therewith, — it avails not ; there 
was nothing universal, nothing eternal in him ; he 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 41 

must fade away, even as the Popinjay-gildings and 
Scarecrow-apparel, which he could not see through. 
The great man does, in good truth, belong to his 
own age ; nay, more so than any other man ; being 
properly the synopsis and epitome of such age with 
its interests and influences : but belongs likewise 
to all ages, otherwise he is not great. What was 
transitory in him passes away; and an immortal 
part remains, the significance of which is in strict 
speech inexhaustible, — as that of every real object 
is. Aloft, conspicuous, on his enduring basis, he 
stands there, serene, unaltering ; silently addresses 
to every new generation a new lesson and monition. 
Well is his Life worth writing, worth interpreting ; 
and ever, in the new dialect of new times, of re- 
writing and re-interpreting. 

Of such chosen men was Samuel Johnson : not 
ranking among the highest, or even the high, yet 
distinctly admitted into that sacred band; whose 
existence was no idle Dream, but a Reality which 
he transacted awake; nowise a Clothes-horse and 
Patent Digester, but a genuine Man. By nature 
he was gifted for the noblest of earthly tasks, that 
of Priesthood, and Guidance of mankind ; by des- 
tiny, moreover, he was appointed to this task, and 
did actually, according to strength, fulfil the same : 
so that always the question, How ; in what spirit ; 
under what shape ? remains for us to be asked and 
answered concerning him. For as the highest 
Gospel was a Biography, so is the Life of every good 



42 SAMUEL JOHNSON. 

man still an indubitable Gospel, and preaches to 
the eye and heart and whole man, so that Devils 
even must believe and tremble/ these gladdest 
tidings : " Man is heaven-born ; not the thrall of 
Circumstances, of Necessity, but the victorious 
subduer thereof: behold how he can become the 
c Announcer of himself and of his Freedom / and 
is ever what the Thinker has named him, 'the 
Messias of Nature!"' — Yes, Reader, all this that 
thou hast so often heard about ' force of circum- 
stances/ ' the creature of the time/ ' balancing of 
motives/ and who knows what melancholy stuff to 
the like purport, wherein thou, as in a nightmare 
Dream, sittest paralysed, and hast no force left, — 
was in very truth, if Johnson and waking men are 
to be credited, little other than a hag-ridden vision 
of death-sleep ; some A&Z/-fact, more fatal at times 
than a whole falsehood. Shake it off; awake ; up 
and be doing, even as it is given thee ! — 

The Contradiction which yawns wide enough in 
every Life, which it is the meaning and task of 
Life to reconcile, was in Johnson' s wider than in 
most. Seldom, for any man, has the contrast be- 
tween the ethereal heavenward side of things, and 
the dark sordid earthward, been more glaring: 
whether we look at Nature's work with him or 
Fortune's, from first to last, heterogeneity, as of 
sunbeams and miry clay, is on all hands manifest. 
Whereby indeed, only this was declared, That 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 43 

much Life had been given him; many things to 
triumph over, a great work to do. Happily also 
he did it ; better than the most. 

Nature had given him a high, keen-visioned, 
almost poetic soul ; yet withal imprisoned it in an 
inert, unsightly body : he that could never rest had 
not limbs that would move with him, but only roll 
and waddle : the inward eye, all-penetrating, all- 
embracing, had to look through bodily windows 
that were dim, half-blinded ; he so loved men, and 
' never once saw the human face divine V Not less 
did he prize the love of men; he was eminently 
social ; the approbation of his fellows was dear to 
him, ' valuable/ as he owned, ' if from the meanest 
of human beings :' yet the first impression he pro- 
duced on every man was to be one of aversion, al- 
most of disgust. By Nature it was farther ordered 
that the imperious Johnson should be born poor : 
the ruler-soul, strong in its native royalty, generous, 
uncontrollable, like the lion of the woods, was to be 
housed, then, in such a dwelling-place : of Disfi- 
gurement, Disease, and lastly of a Poverty which 
itself made him the servant of servants. Thus was 
the born king likewise a born slave : the divine 
spirit of Music has to awake imprisoned amid dull- 
croaking universal Discords ; the Ariel finds him- 
self encased in the coarse hulls of a Caliban. So 
is it more or less, we know (and thou, O Reader, 
knowest and feelest even now), with all men : yet 
with the fewest men in any such degree as with 
Johnson. 



44 SAMUEL JOHNSON. 

Fortune, moreover, which had so managed his 
first appearance in the world, lets not her hand lie 
idle, or turn the other way, but works unweariedly 
in the same spirit, while he is journeying through 
the world. What such a mind, stamped of Nature's 
noblest metal, though in so ungainly a die, was 
specially and best of all fitted for, might still be a 
question. To none of the world's few Incorporated 
Guilds could he have adjusted himself without dif- 
ficulty, without distortion ; in none been a Guild- 
Brother well at ease. Perhaps, if we look to the 
strictly practical nature of his faculty, to the 
strength, decision, method that manifests itself in 
him, we may say that his calling was rather towards 
Active than Speculative life ; that as Statesman (in 
the higher, now obsolete sense), Lawgiver, Ruler, 
in short, as Doer of the Work, he had shone even 
more than as Speaker of the Word. His honesty 
of heart, his courageous temper, the value he set 
on things outward and material, might have made 
him a King among Kings. Had the golden age 
of those new French Prophets, when it shall be a 
chacun selon sa capacite, a chaque capacite selon ses 
ceuvres, but arrived ! Indeed even in our brazen 
and Birmingham-lacker age, he himself regretted 
that he had not become a Lawyer, and risen to be 
Chancellor, which he might well have done. How- 
ever, it was otherwise appointed. To no man does 
Fortune throw open all the kingdoms of this world, 
and say : It is thine ; choose where thou wilt dwell ! 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 45 

To the most she opens hardly the smallest cranny 
or doghutch; and says, not without asperity : There, 
that is thine while thou canst keep it ; nestle thy- 
self there, and bless Heaven ! Alas, men must fit 
themselves into many things : some forty years ago, 
for instance, the noblest and ablest Man in all the 
British lands might be seen not swaying the royal 
sceptre, or the pontifFs censer, on the pinnacle of 
the World, but gauging ale-tubs in the little burgh 
of Dumfries ! Johnson came a little nearer the 
mark than Burns : but with him too, c Strength 
was mournfully denied its arena ;' he too had to 
fight Fortune at strange odds, all his life long. 

Johnson's disposition for royalty (had the Fates 
so ordered it) is well seen in early boyhood. c His 
c favourites/ says Boswell, 'used to receive very 
' liberal assistance from him ; and such was the sub- 
' mission and deference with which he was treated, 
c that three of the boys, of whom Mr. Hector was 
' sometimes one, used to come in the morning as 
' his humble attendants, and carry him to school. 
' One in the middle stooped, while he sat upon his 
' back, and one on each side supported him ; and 
' thus was he borne triumphant/ The purfly, sand- 
blind lubber and blubber, with his open mouth, 
and face of bruised honeycomb ; yet already domi- 
nant, imperial, irresistible ! Not in the c King^s- 
chair' (of human arms), as w r e see, do his three 
satellites carry him along : rather on the Tyrant's- 
saddle, the back of his fellow-creature, must he ride 



46 SAMUEL JOHNSON. 



prosperous ! — The child is father of the man. He 
who had seen fifty years into coming Time, would 
have felt that little spectacle of mischievous school- 
boys to be a great one. For us, who look back on 
it, and what followed it, now" from afar, there arise 
questions enough : How looked these urchins ? 
What jackets and galligaskins had they; felt head- 
gear, or of dogskin leather ? What was old Lich- 
field doing then; what thinking? — and so on, 
through the whole series of Corporal Trim's 'aux- 
iliary verbs/ A picture of it all fashions itself 
together ; — only unhappily we have no brush, and 
no fingers. 

Boyhood is now past ; the ferula of Pedagogue 
waves harmless > in the distance : Samuel has 
struggled up to uncouth bulk and youthhood, 
wrestling with Disease and Poverty, all the way ; 
which two continue still his companions. At Col- 
lege we see little of him; yet thus much, that 
things went not well. A rugged wildman of the 
desert, awakened to the feeling of himself; proud 
as the proudest, poor as the poorest ; stoically shut 
up, silently enduring the incurable : what a world 
of blackest gloom, with sun-gleams and pale tearful 
moon-gleams, and flickerings of a celestial and an 
infernal splendour, was this that now opened for 
him ! But the weather is wintry ; and the toes of 
the man are looking through his shoes. His muddy 
features grow of a purple and sea-green colour ; a 
flood of black indignation mantling beneath. A 






SAMUEL JOHNSON. 47 

truculent, raw-boned figure ! Meat he has pro- 
bably little ; hope he has less : his feet, as we said, 
have come into brotherhood with the cold mire. 

' Shall I be particular,' inquires Sir John Hawkins, ' and 
relate a circumstance of his distress, that cannot be im- 
puted to him as an effect of his own extravagance or ir- 
regularity, and consequently reflects no disgrace on his 
memory ? He had scarce any change of raiment, and, in 
a short time after Corbet left him, but one pair of shoes, 
and those so old that his feet were seen through them : a 
gentleman of his college, the father of an eminent clergy- 
man now living, directed a servitor one morning to place a 
new pair at the door of Johnson's chamber; who seeing 
them upon his first going out, so far forgot himself and the 
spirit which must have actuated his unknown benefactor, 
that, with all the indignation of an insulted man, he threw 
them away.' 

How exceedingly surprising ! — The Rev. Dr. 
Hall remarks : c As far as we can judge from a cur- 
' sory view of the weekly account in the buttery- 
( books, Johnson appears to have lived as well as 
€ other commoners and scholars/ Alas ! such c cur- 
sory view of the buttery -books/ now from the safe 
distance of a century, in the safe chair of a College 
Mastership, is one thing ; the continual view of the 
empty or locked buttery itself was quite a different 
thing. But hear our Knight, how he farther dis- 
courses. ' Johnson/ quoth Sir John, c could not 
' at this early period of his life divest himself of 
' an idea that poverty was disgraceful ; and was very 
f severe in his censures of that economy in both 
1 our Universities, which exacted at meals the at- 



48 SAMUEL JOHNSON. 

' tendance of poor scholars, under the several de- 
nominations of Servitors in the one, and Sizer 
' in the other : he thought that the scholar's, like 
c the Christian life, levelled all distinctions of rank 
'and worldly pre-eminence; but in this he was 
{ mistaken : civil polity' &c. &c. — Too true ! It is 
man's lot to err. 

However, Destiny, in all ways, means to prove 
the mistaken Samuel, and see what stuff is in him. 
He must leave these butteries of Oxford, Want 
like an armed man compelling him; retreat into 
his father's mean home ; and there abandon himself 
for a season to inaction, disappointment, shame and 
nervous melancholy nigh run mad : he is probably 
the wretchedest man in wide England. In all ways, 
he too must f become perfect through suffering.' — 
High thoughts have visited him ; his College Exer- 
cises have been praised beyond the walls of Col- 
lege ; Pope himself has seen that Translation, and 
approved of it : Samuel had whispered to himself: 
I too am 'one and somewhat.' False thoughts; 
that leave only misery behind ! The fever-fire of 
Ambition is too painfully extinguished (but not 
cured) in the frost-bath of Poverty. Johnson has 1 
knocked at the gate, as one having a right ; but 
there was no opening : the world lies all encircled 3 
as with brass; nowhere can he find or force the 1 
smallest entrance. An ushership at Market Bos- 
worth, and ' a disagreement between him and Sir j 
Wolstan Dixie, the patron of the school,' yields J 






SAMUEL JOHNSON. 49 

him bread of affliction and water of affliction ; but 
so bitter, that unassisted human nature cannot 
swallow them. Young Samson will grind no more 
in the Philistine mill of Bosworth ; quits hold of 
Sir Wolstan, and the ( domestic chaplaincy, so far 
' at least as to say grace at table/ and also to be 
'treated with what he represented as intolerable 
' harshness / and so, after ' some months of such 
€ complicated misery/ feeling doubtless that there 
are worse things in the world than quick death by 
Famine, ' relinquishes a situation, which all his life 
' afterwards he recollected with the strongest aver- 
'sion, and even horror/ Men like Johnson are 
properly called the Forlorn Hope of the World : 
judge whether his hope was forlorn or not, by this 
Letter to a dull oily Printer, who called himself 
Sylvanus Urban: 

1 Sir, — As you appear no less sensible than your readers 
of the defect of your poetical article, you will not be dis- 
pleased if (in order to the improvement of it) I communi- 
cate to you the sentiments of a person who will undertake, 
on reasonable terms, sometimes to fill a column. 

' His opinion is, that the public would,' &c. &c. 

* If such a correspondence will be agreeable to you, be 
pleased to inform me in two posts, what the conditions are 
on which you shall expect it. Your late offer (for a Prize 
Poem) gives me no reason to distrust your generosity. If 
you engage in any literary projects besides this paper, I 
have other designs to impart.' 

Reader, the generous person, to whom this letter 
goes addressed, is ' Mr. Edmund Cave, at St. John's 

E 



50 SAMUEL JOHNSON. 

Gate, London / the addressor of it is Samuel John- 
son, in Birmingham, Warwickshire. 

Nevertheless, Life rallies in the man ; reasserts 
its right to be lived, even to be enjoyed. ' Better 
a small bush/ say the Scotch, c than no shelter :' 
Johnson learns to be contented with humble hu- 
man things ; and is there not already an actual 
realised human Existence, all stirring and living 
on every hand of him ? Go thou and do likewise ! 
In Birmingham itself, with his own purchased 
goose-quill, he can earn ' five guineas /nay, finally, 
the choicest terrestrial good : a Friend, who will be 
Wife to him ! Johnson' s marriage with the good 
Widow Porter has been treated with ridicule by 
many mortals, who apparently had no understand- 
ing thereof. That the purblind, seamy-faced Wild- 
man, stalking lonely, woe-stricken, like some Irish 
Gallowglass with peeled club, whose speech no 
man knew, whose look all men both laughed at and 
shuddered at, should find any brave female heart 
to acknowledge, at first sight and hearing of him, 
" This is the most sensible man I ever met with f* 
and then, with generous courage, to take him to 
itself, and say, Be thou mine; be thou warmed 
here, and thawed to life ! — in all this, in the kind 
Widow's love and pity for him, in Johnson's love 
and gratitude, there is actually no matter for ri- 
dicule. Their wedded life, as is the common lot, 
was made up of drizzle and dry weather ; but inno- 
cence and worth dwelt in it ; and when death had 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 51 

ended it, a certain sacredness : Johnson's deathless 
affection for his Tetty was always venerable and 
noble. However, be this as it might, Johnson is 
now minded to wed ; and will live by the trade of 
Pedagogy, for by this also may life be kept in. Let 
the world therefore take notice: 'At Edial near 
'Lichfield, in Staffordshire, young gentlemen are 
c boarded, and taught the Latin and Greek languages, 
'by — Samuel Johnson/ Had this Edial enter- 
prise prospered, how different might the issue have 
been ! Johnson had lived a life of unnoticed noble- 
ness, or swoln into some amorphous Dr. Parr, of 
no avail to us; Bozzy would have dwindled into 
official insignificance, or risen by some other ele- 
vation ; old Auchinleck had never been afflicted 
with " ane that keeped a schule," or obliged to vio- 
late hospitality by over-loud logic with a guest, — 
" Cromwell do ? God, sir, he garr'd kings ken that 
there was a lith in their neck!" — But the Edial 
enterprise did not prosper ; Destiny had other work 
appointed for Samuel Johnson ; and young gentle- 
men got board where they could elsewhere find 
it. This man was to become a Teacher of grown 
gentlemen, in the most surprising way ; a Man of 
Letters, and Euler of the British Nation for some 
time, — not of their bodies merely, but of their 
minds, not over them, but in them. 

The career of Literature could not, in Johnson's 
day, any more than now, be said to lie along the 



52 SAMUEL JOHNSON. 

shores of a Pactolus : whatever else might be ga- 
thered there, gold-dust was nowise the chief pro- 
duce. The world, from the times of Socrates, St. 
Paul, tod far earlier, has always had its Teachers ; 
and always treated them in a peculiar way. A 
shrewd Townclerk (not of Ephesus), once, in found- 
ing a Burgh- Seminary, when the question came, 
How the Schoolmasters should be maintained? 
delivered this brief counsel: (( J) — n them, keep 
them poor I" Considerable wisdom may lie in this 
aphorism. At all events, we see, the world has 
acted on it long, and indeed improved on it, — 
putting many a Schoolmaster of its great Burgh- 
Seminary to a death, which even cost it something. 
The world, it is true, had for some time been too 
busy to go out of its way, and put any Author to 
death; however, the old sentence pronounced against 
them was found to be pretty sufficient. The first 
Writers, being Monks, were sworn to a vow of 
Poverty ; the modern Authors had no need to swear 
to it. This was the epoch when an Otway could still 
die of hunger ; not to speak of your innumerable 
Scrogginses, whom ( the Muse found stretched be- 
neath a rug/ with c rusty grate unconscious of a 
fire/ stocking-nightcap, sanded floor, and all the 
other escutcheons of the craft, time out of mind 
the heirlooms of Authorship. Scroggins, however, 
seems to have been but an idler ; not at all so dili- 
gent as worthy Mr. Boyce, whom we might have 
seen sitting up in bed, with his wearing-apparel of 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 53 

Blanket about him, and a hole slit in the same, 
that his hand might be at liberty to work in its 
vocation. The worst was, that too frequently a 
blackguard recklessness of temper ensued, inca- 
pable of turning to account what good the gods 
even here had provided : your Boyces acted on some 
stoieo-epicurean principle of carpe diem, as men do 
in bombarded towns, and seasons of raging pesti- 
lence; — and so had lost not only their life, and 
presence of mind, but their status as persons of 
respectability. The trade of Author was at about 
one of its lowest ebbs when Johnson embarked 
on it. 

Accordingly we find no mention of Illuminations 
in the city of London, when this same Ruler of 
the British Nation arrived in it : *no cannon-sal- 
voes are fired ; no flourish of drums and trumpets 
greets his appearance on the scene. He enters 
quite quietly, with some copper halfpence in his 
pocket; creeps into lodgings in Exeter Street, 
Strand ; and has a Coronation Pontiff also, of not 
less peculiar equipment, whom, with all submis- 
siveness, he must wait upon, in his Vatican of St. 
John's Gate. This is the dull oily Printer alluded 
to above. 

' Cave's temper/ says our Knight Hawkins, ' was phleg- 
matic : though he assumed, as the publisher of the Maga- 
zine, the name of Sylvanus Urban, he had few of those 
qualities that constitute urbanity. Judge of his want of 
them by this question, which he once put to an author : 
" Mr. , I hear you have just published a pamphlet, and 



54 SAMUEL JOHNSON. 

am told there is a very good paragraph in it upon the sub- 
ject of music : did you write that yourself?" His discern- 
ment was also slow ; and as he had already at his command 
some writers of prose and verse, who, in the language of 
Booksellers, are called good hands, he was the backwarder 
in making advances, or courting an intimacy with Johnson. 
Upon the first approach of a stranger, his practice was to 
continue sitting ; a posture in which he was ever to be 
found, and for a few minutes to continue silent : if at any 
time he was inclined to begin the discourse, it was gene- 
rally by putting a leaf of the Magazine, then in the press, 
into the hand of his visitor, and asking his opinion of it. 

M. M. M, M. M. M. M. 

W W "»P W W W "W 

f He was so incompetent a judge of Johnson's abilities, 
that meaning at one time to dazzle him with the splendour 
of some of those luminaries in Literature, who favoured 
him with their correspondence, he told him that if he 
would, in the evening, be at a certain alehouse in the 
neighbourhood of Clerkenwell, he might have a chance of 
seeing Mr. Browne and another or two of those illustrious 
contributors : Johnson accepted the invitation ; and being 
introduced by Cave, dressed in a loose horseman's coat, 
and such a great bushy wig as he constantly wore, to the 
sight of Mr. Browne, whom he found sitting at the upper 
end of a long table, in a cloud of tobacco-smoke, had his 
curiosity gratified. ' # 

In fact, if we look seriously into the condition 
of Authorship at that period, we shall find that 
Johnson had undertaken one of the ruggedest of 
all possible enterprises ; that here as elsewhere For- 
tune had given him unspeakable Contradictions 
to reconcile. For a man of Johnson's stamp, the 

* Hawkins, 46-50. 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 55 

Problem was twofold : First, not only as the hum- 
ble but indispensable condition of all else, to keep 
himself, if so might be, alive ; but secondly, to keep 
himself alive by speaking forth the Truth that was 
in him, and speaking it truly, that is, in the clear- 
est and fittest utterance the Heavens had enabled 
him to give it, let the Earth say to this what she 
liked. Of which twofold Problem if it be hard to 
solve either member separately, how incalculably 
more so to solve it, when both are conjoined, and 
work with endless complication into one another ! 
He that finds himself already kept alive can some- 
times (unhappily not always) speak a little truth ; 
he that finds himself able and willing, to all lengths, 
to speak lies, may, by watching how the wind sits, 
scrape together a livelihood, sometimes of great 
splendour : he, again, who finds himself provided 
with neither endowment, has but a ticklish game 
to play, and shall have praises if he win it. Let 
us look a little at both faces of the matter; and 
see what front they then offered our Adventurer, 
what front he offered them. 

At the time of Johnson's appearance on the 
field, Literature, in many senses, was in a transi- 
tional state; chiefly in this sense, as respects the 
pecuniary subsistence of its cultivators. It was in 
the very act of passing from the protection of Pa- 
trons into that of the Public ; no longer to supply 
its necessities by laudatory Dedications to the Great, 
but by judicious Bargains with the Booksellers. 



56 SAMUEL JOHNSON. 

This happy change has been much sung and cele- 
brated ; many a ' lord of the lion heart and eagle 
eye' looking back with scorn enough on the bygone 
system of Dependency: so that now it were perhaps 
well to consider ; for a moment, what good might 
also be in it, what gratitude we owe it. That a 
good was in it, admits not of doubt. Whatsoever 
has existed has had its value : without some truth 
and worth lying in it, the thing could not have 
hung together, and been the organ and sustenance, 
and method of action, for men that reasoned and 
were alive. Translate a Falsehood which is wholly 
false into Practice, the result comes out zero ; there 
is no fruit or issue to be derived from it. That in 
an age, when a Nobleman was still noble, still with 
his wealth the protector of worthy and humane 
things, and still venerated as such, a poor Man of 
Genius, his brother in nobleness, should, with un- 
feigned reverence, address him and say : " I have 
found Wisdom here, and would fain proclaim it 
abroad ; wilt thou, of thy abundance, afford me the 
means?" — in all this there was no baseness; it 
was wholly an honest proposal, which a free man 
might make, and a free man listen to. So might 
a Tasso, with a Gerusalemme in his hand or in his 
head, speak to a Duke of Ferrara; so might a 
Shakspeare to his Southampton ; and Continental 
Artists generally to their rich Protectors, — in some 
countries, down almost to these days. It was only 
when the reverence became feigned, that baseness 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 57 

entered into the transaction on both sides; and, 
indeed, flourished there with rapid luxuriance, till 
that became disgraceful for a Dryden, which a 
Shakspeare could once practise without offence. 

Neither, it is very true, was the new way of 
Bookseller Msecenasship worthless ; which opened 
itself at this juncture, for the most important of 
all transport-trades, now when the old way had 
become too miry and impassable. Remark, more- 
over, how this second sort of Msecenasship, after 
carrying, us through nearly a century of Literary 
Time, appears now to have wellnigh discharged its 
function also; and to be working pretty rapidly 
towards some third method, the exact conditions 
of which are yet nowise visible. Thus all things 
have their end ; and we should part with them all, 
not in anger, but in peace. The Bookseller-Sy- 
stem, during its peculiar century, the whole of the 
eighteenth, did carry us handsomely along; and 
many good Works it has left us, and many good 
Men it maintained : if it is now expiring by Puf- 
fery, as the Patronage- System did by Flattery 
(for Lying is ever the forerunner of Death, nay is 
itself Death), let us not forget its benefits; how 
it nursed Literature through boyhood and school- 
years, as Patronage had wrapped it in soft swad- 
dling-bands; — till now we see it about to put on 
the toga virilis, could it but find any such ! 

There is tolerable travelling on the beaten road, 
run how it may; only on the new road not yet 



58 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 



levelled and paved, and on the old road all broker 
into ruts and quagmires, is the travelling bad 
impracticable. The difficulty lies always in tl 
transition from one method to another. In which 
state it was that Johnson now found Literature \ 
and out of which, let us also say, he manfully ca 
ried it. What remarkable mortal first paid cop 
right in England we have not ascertained ; perhaj 
for almost a century before, some scarce visible 
ponderable pittance of wages had occasionally bee 
yielded by the Seller of Books to the Writer 
them : the original Covenant, stipulating to pre 
duce Paradise Lost on the one hand, and Five 
Pounds Sterling on the other, even now lies (we . 
have been told) in black-on-white, for inspection 
and purchase by the curious, at a Bookshop in 
Chancery Lane.*" Thus had the matter gone on, 
in a mixed confused way, for some threescore years ; 
— as ever, in such things, the old system overlaps 
the new, by some generation or two, and only dies 
quite out when the new has got a complete orga- 
nisation, and weather-worthy surface of its own. 
Among the first Authors, the very first of any sig- 
nificance, who lived by the day's wages of his craft, j 
and composedly faced the world on that basis, was 
Samuel Johnson. 

At the time of Johnson's appearance, there were 
still two ways, on which an Author might attempt 

* Bought there by Mr. Eogers, and now in his possession. 
(Note of 1853.) 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 59 

proceeding : there were the Maecenases .proper in the 
West End of London ; and the Maecenases virtual 
of St. John's Gate and Paternoster Row. To a 
considerate man it might seem uncertain which 
method were preferable : neither had very high 
attractions ; the Patron's aid was now wellnigh 
necessarily polluted by sycophancy, before it could 
come to hand ; the Bookseller's was deformed with 
greedy stupidity, not to say entire wooden-headed- 
ness and disgust (so that an Osborne even required 
to be knocked down, by an author of spirit), and 
could barely keep the thread of life together. The 
one was the wages of suffering and poverty; the 
■ other, unless you gave strict heed to it, the wages 
of sin. In time, Johnson had opportunity of look- 
ing into both methods, and ascertaining what they 
were ; but found, at first trial, that the former 
would in nowise do for him. Listen, once again, 
to that far-famed Blast of Doom, proclaiming into 
the ear of Lord Chesterfield, and, through him, of 
the listening world, that patronage should be no 
more ! 

* Seven years, my Lord, have now past, since I waited 
in your outward rooms, or was repulsed from your door ; 
during which time I have been pushing on my Work # 
through difficulties, of which it is useless to complain, and 
have brought it at last to the verge of publication, without 
one act of assistance,t one word of encouragement, or one 
smile of favour. 

* The English Dictionary. 

t Were time and printer's space of no value, it were easy to 



60 SAMUEL JOHNSON. 

' The shepherd in Yirgil grew at last acquainted with ] 
Love, and found him a native of the rocks. 

6 Is not a patron, my Lord, one who looks with uncon- 1 
cern on a man struggling for life in the water, and when 
he has reached ground, encumbers him with help ? The 
notice which you have been pleased to take of my labours, 
had it been early, had been kind : but it has been delayed 
till I am indifferent and cannot enjoy it ; till I am solitary 
and cannot impart it ; till I am known and do not want it. 
I hope, it is no very cynical asperity, not to confess obliga- 
tions, where no benefit has been received ; or to be un- 
willing that the public should consider me as owing that 
to a patron which Providence has enabled me to do for 
myself. 

' Having carried on my Work thus far with so little 
obligation to any favourer of learning ; I shall not be dis- 
appointed though I should conclude it, if less be possible, 
with less : for I have long been awakened from that dream 
of hope, in which I once boasted myself with so much 
exultation, 

* My Lord, your Lordship's most humble, most obedient . 
servant, 

' Sam. Johnson.' 

And thus must the rebellions e Sam. Johnson* 
turn him to the Bookselling guild, and the won- 
drous chaos of ' Author by trade / and, though 
ushered into it only by that dull oily Printer, 

wash away certain foolish soot-stains dropped here as c Notes ;' 
especially two : the one on this word, and on Bos well's Note to 
it ; the other on the paragraph which follows. Let c Ed.' look a 
second time ; he will find that Johnson's sacred regard for Truth 
is the only thing to be ' noted,' in the former case ; also, in the 
latter, that this of c Love's bemg a native of the rocks' actually 
has a ' meaning.' 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 61 

'with loose horseman's coat, and such a great 
bushy wig as he constantly wore/ and only as sub- 
altern to some commanding-officer ' Browne, sit- 
ting amid tobacco-smoke at the head of a long 
table in the alehouse at Clerkenwell/ — gird him- 
self together for the warfare; having no alter- 
native ! 

Little less contradictory was that other branch 
of the twofold Problem now set before Johnson : 
the speaking forth of Truth. Nay, taken by itself, 
it had in those days become so complex as to 
puzzle strongest heads, with nothing else imposed 
on them for solution ; and even to turn high heads 
of that sort into mere hollow vizards, speaking 
neither truth nor falsehood, nor anything but what 
the Prompter and Playactor (vTro/cpiTrjs;) put into 
them. Alas for poor Johnson ! Contradiction 
abounded; in spirituals and in temporals, within 
and without. Born with the strongest uncon- 
querable love of just Insight, he has to start, and 
begin to live and learn, in a scene where Prejudice 
flourishes with rank luxuriance. England was all 
confused enough, sightless and yet restless, take it 
where you would ; but figure the best intellect in 
England nursed up to manhood in the idol-cavern 
of a poor Tradesman's house, in the cathedral city 
of Lichfield ! What is Truth ? said jesting Pilate. 
What is truth ? might earnest Johnson much more 
emphatically say. Truth, no longer, like the Phoe- 
nix, in rainbow plumage, poured, from her glitter- 



62 SAMUEL JOHNSON. 

ing beak, such tones of sweetest melody as took 
captive every ear: the Phoenix (waxing old) had 
wellnigh ceased her singing, and empty weari- 
some Cuckoos, and doleful monotonous Owls, innu- 
merable Jays also, and twittering Sparrows on the 
housetop, pretended they were repeating her. 

It was wholly a divided age, that of Johnson; 
Unity existed nowhere, in its Heaven, or in its 
Earth. Society, through every fibre, was rent 
asunder : all things, it was then becoming visible, 
but could not then be understood, were moving 
onwards, with an impulse received ages before, yet 
now first with a decisive rapidity, towards that 
great chaotic gulf, where, whether in the shape ofj 
French Revolutions, Reform Bills, or what shape 
soever, bloody or bloodless, the descent and en- 
gulfment assume, we now see them weltering and 
boiling. Already Cant, as once before hinted, had 
begun to play its wonderful part, for the hour was 
come : two ghastly Apparitions, unreal simulacra 
both, Hypocrisy and Atheism are already, in 
silence, parting the world. Opinion and Action, 
which should live together as wedded pair, 'one 
flesh/ more properly as Soul and Body, have com- 
menced their open quarrel, and are suing for a 
separate maintenance, — as if they could exist se- 
parately. To the earnest mind, in any position/ 
firm footing and a life of Truth was becoming daily 
more difficult : in Johnson's position, it was more 
difficult than in almost any other. 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 63 

If, as for a devout nature was inevitable and 
indispensable, he looked up to Religion, as to the 
polestar of his voyage, already there was no fixed 
polestar any longer visible ; but two stars, a whole 
constellation of stars, each proclaiming itself as the 
true. There was the red portentous comet-star of 
Infidelity; the dim fixed-star, burning ever dim- 
mer, uncertain now whether not an atmospheric 
meteor, of Orthodoxy : which of these to choose ? 
The keener intellects of Europe had, almost with- 
out exception, ranged themselves under the for- 
mer: for some half century, it had been the general 
effort of European speculation to proclaim that De- 
struction of Falsehood was the only Truth ; daily 
had Denial waxed stronger and stronger, Belief 
sunk more and more into decay. From our Bo- 
lingbrokes and Tolands, the sceptical fever had 
passed into France, into Scotland; and already it 
smouldered, far and wide, secretly eating out the 
heart of England. Bayle had played his part; 
Voltaire, on a wider theatre, was playing his, — 
Johnson's senior by some fifteen years : Hume and 
Johnson were children almost of the same year.^" 
To this keener order -of intellects did Johnson's 
indisputably belong: was he to join them; was 
he to oppose them ? A complicated question : for, 
alas, the Church itself is no longer, even to him, 
wholly of true adamant, but of adamant and baked 
mud conjoined : the zealously Devout must find 
* Johnson, September, 1709 ; Hume, April, 1711. 



64 SAMUEL JOHNSON. 

his Church tottering; and pause amazed to se 
instead of inspired Priest, many a swine-feedir 
Trulliber ministering at her altar. It is not the 
least curious of the incoherences which Johnson 
had to reconcile, that, though by nature contemj 
tuous and incredulous, he was, at that time of day, 
to find his safety and glory in defending, with ; 
whole might, the traditions of the elders. 

Not less perplexingly intricate, and on both side 
hollow or questionable, was the aspect of Politics.! 
Whigs struggling blindly forward, Tories holding 
blindly back; each with some forecast of a half 
truth; neither with any forecast of the whole ■ 
Admire here this other Contradiction in the life \ 
of Johnson ; that, though the most ungovernable^! 
and in practice the most independent of men, hel 
must be a Jacobite, and worshipper of the Divin« 
Right. In Politics also there are Irreconcilables 
enough for him. As, indeed, how could it bel 
otherwise? For when Religion is torn asunde™ 
and the very heart of man's existence set against! 
itself, then in all subordinate departments there! 
must needs be hollowness, incoherence. The EnJ 
glish Nation had rebelled against a Tyrant ; and, 
by the hands of religious tyrannicides, exacted! 
stern vengeance of him: Democracy had risen iron- 
sinewed, and, 'like an infant Hercules, strangled! 
serpents in its cradle/ But as yet none knew thel 
meaning or extent of the phenomenon : Europe! 
was not ripe for it ; not to be ripened for it, but! 






SAMUEL JOHNSON. 65 

by the culture and various experience of another 
century and a half. And now, when the King- 
killers were all swept away, and a milder second 
picture was painted over the canvas of the first, 
and betitled c Glorious Revolution/ who doubted 
but the catastrophe was over, the whole business 
finished, and Democracy gone to its long sleep? 
Yet was it like a business finished and not finished ; 
a lingering uneasiness dwelt in all minds : the 
deep-lying, resistless Tendency, which had still to 
be obeyed, could no longer be recognised ; thus 
was there halfness, insincerity, uncertainty in men's 
ways; instead of heroic Puritans and heroic Ca- 
valiers, came now a dawdling set of argumentative 
Whigs, and a dawdling set of deaf-eared Tories; 
each half-foolish, each half-false. The Whigs were 
false and without basis ; inasmuch as their whole 
object was Resistance, Criticism, Demolition, — 
they knew not why, or towards what issue. In 
Whiggism, ever since a Charles and his Jeffries 
had ceased to meddle with it, and to have any 
Russel or Sydney to meddle with, there could be 
no divineness of character ; not till, in these latter 
days, it took the figure of a thorough-going, all- 
defying Radicalism, was there any solid footing for 
it to stand on. Of the like uncertain, half-hollow 
nature had Toryism become, in Johnson's time; 
preaching forth indeed an everlasting truth, the 
duty of Loyalty; yet now, ever since the final ex- 
pulsion of the Stuarts, having no Person, but only 



66 SAMUEL JOHNSON. 

an Office to be loyal to ; no living Soul to worship, 
but only a dead velvet-cusliioned Chair. Its atti- 
tude, therefore, was stiff-necked refusal to move ; 
as that of Whiggism was clamorous command ten 
move, — let rhyme and reason, on both hands, say 
to it what they might. The consequence was : 
Immeasurable floods of contentious jargon, tend- « 
ing nowhither; false conviction; false resistance 
to conviction; decay (ultimately to become de8 
cease) of whatsoever was once understood by the 
words, Principle, or Honesty of heart ; the louder 
and louder triumph of Halfaess and Plausibility 
over Wholeness and Truth; — at last, this all-over-1 
shadowing efflorescence of Quackery, which wel 
now see, with all its deadening and killing fruits, 
in all its innumerable branches, down to the lowest! 
How, between these jarring extremes, wherein the ' 
rotten lay so inextricably intermingled with the! 
so and, and as yet no eye could see through th« 
ulterior meaning of the matter, was a faithful and 
true man to adjust himself? 

That Johnson, in spite of all drawbacks, adopted] 
the Conservative side ; stationed himself as the un3 
yielding opponent of Innovation, resolute to hold| 
fast the form of sound words, could not but in* 
crease, in no small measure, the difficulties he hadj 
to strive with. We mean, the moral difficulties ; foil 
in economical respects, it might be pretty equalljj 
balanced ; the Tory servant of the Public had per- 
haps about the same chance of promotion as the] 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 67 

Whig : and all the promotion Johnson aimed at 
was the privilege to live. But, for what, though 
unavowed, was no less indispensable, for his peace 
of conscience, and the clear ascertainment and feel- 
ing of his Duty as an inhabitant of God's world, 
the case was hereby rendered much more complex,, 
To resist Innovation is easy enough on one condi- 
tion : that you resist Inquiry. This is, and was, 
the common expedient of your common Conserva- 
tives ; but it would not do for Johnson : he was a 
zealous recommender and practiser of Inquiry ; 
once for all, could not and would not believe, much 
less speak and act, a Falsehood : the form of sound 
words, which he held fast, must have a meaning in 
it. Here lay the difficultjr : to behold a porten- 
tous mixture of True and False, and feel that he 
must dwell and fight there ; yet to love and defend 
only the True. How worship, when you cannot 
and will not be an idolater ; yet cannot help dis- 
cerning that the Symbol of your Divinity has half 
become idolatrous ? This was the question, which 
Johnson, the man both of clear eye and devout 
believing heart, must answer, — at peril of his life. 
The Whig or Sceptic, on the other hand, had a 
much simpler part to play. To him only the ido- 
latrous side of things, nowise the divine one, lay 
visible : not worship, therefore, nay in the strict 
sense not heart-honesty, only at most lip- and 
hand-honesty, is required of him. What spiritual 
force is his, he can conscientiously employ in the 



68 SAMUEL JOHNSON. 

work of cavilling, of pulling down what is False 
For the rest, that there is or can be any Truth 
a higher than sensual nature, has not occurred 
him. The utmost, therefore, that he as man ha 
to aim at, is Respectability, the suffrages of 
fellow-men. Such suffrages he may weigh as we 
as count ; or count only : according as he is 
Burke, or a Wilkes. But beyond these there lie 
nothing divine for him; these attained, all is at 
tained. Thus is his whole world distinct an 
rounded in ; a clear goal is set before him ; a firm 
path, rougher or smoother ; at worst a firm region 
wherein to seek a path : let him gird up his loins, 
and travel on without misgivings ! For the honest 9 
Conservative, again, nothing is distinct, nothing 
rounded in : Respectability can nowise be his j 
highest Godhead; not one aim, but two conflict- 
ing aims to be continually reconciled by him, has 
he to strive after. A difficult position, as we said ; 
which accordingly the most did, even in those 
days, but half defend : by the surrender, namely, of 
their ow T n too cumbersome honesty, by the blind- 
ing of their own too importunate understanding ; 
after which the completest defence was worth little. 
Into this difficult position Johnson, nevertheless, 
threw himself: found it indeed full of difficulties ; 
yet held it out manfully, as an honest-hearted, 
open-sighted man, while life was in him. 

Such was that same c twofold Problem' set before 
Samuel Johnson. Consider all these moral diffi- 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 69 

culties ; and add to them the fearful aggravation, 
which lay in that other circumstance, that he needed 
a continual appeal to the Public, must continually 
produce a certain impression and conviction on the 
Public ; that if he did not, he ceased to have ' pro- 
vision for the day that was passing over him/ he 
could not any longer live ! How a vulgar charac- 
ter, once launched into this wild element ; driven 
onwards by Pear and Famine ; without other aim 
than to clutch what Provender (of Enjoyment in 
any kind) he could get, always if possible keeping 
quite clear of the Gallows and Pillory, that is to 
say, minding heedfully both c person' and ' charac- 
ter/ — would have floated hither and thither in it ; 
and contrived to eat some three repasts daily, and 
wear some three suits yearly, and then to depart 
and disappear, having consumed his last ration : 
all this might be worth knowing, but were in itself 
a trivial knowledge. How a noble man, resolute 
for the Truth, to whom Shams and Lies were once 
for all an abomination, was to act in it : here lay 
the mystery. By what methods, by what gifts of 
eye and hand, does a heroic Samuel Johnson, now 
when cast forth into that waste Chaos of Author- 
ship, maddest of things, a mingled Phlegethon and 
Fleet-ditch, with its floating lumber, and sea- 
krakens, and mud-spectres, — shape himself a voy- 
age ; of the transient driftwood, and the enduring 
iron, build him a sea-worthy Life-boat, and sail 
therein, undrowned, unpolluted, through the roar- 



70 SAMUEL JOHNSON. 

ing ( mother of dead dogs/ onwards to an eternal 
Landmark, and City that hath foundations ? This 
high question is even the one answered in Bos- 
welPs Book ; which Book we therefore, not so 
falsely, have named a Heroic Poem ; for in it there 
lies the whole argument of such. Glory to our 
brave Samuel ! He accomplished this wonderful 
Problem; and now through long generations, we 
point to him, and say : Here also was a Man ; let 
the world once more have assurance of a Man ! 

Had there been in Johnson, now when afloat on 
that confusion worse confounded of grandeur and 
squalor, no light but an earthly outward one, he 
too must have made shipwreck. With his diseased 
body, and vehement voracious heart, how easy for 
him to become a carpe-diem Philosopher, like the 
rest, and live and die as miserably as any Boyce of 
that Brotherhood ! But happily there was a higher 
light for him ; shining as a lamp to his path ; which, 
in all paths, would teach him to act and walk not 
as a fool, but as wise, and in those evil clays too 
' redeeming the time/ Under dimmer or clearer 
manifestations, a Truth had been revealed to him : 
I also am a Man ; even in this unutterable element 
of Authorship, I may live as beseems a man ! That 
Wrong is not only different from Right, but that it 
is in strict scientific terms infinitely different ; even 
as the gaining of the whole world set against the 
losing of one's own soul, or (as Johnson had it) a 
Heaven set against a Hell ; that in all situations 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 71 

out of the Pit of Tophet, wherein a living Man has 
stood or can stand, there is actually a Prize of quite 
infinite value placed within his reach, namely a 
Duty for him to do : this highest Gospel, which 
forms the basis and worth of all other Gospels 
whatsoever, had been revealed to Samuel Johnson; 
and the man had believed it, and laid it faithfully 
to heart. Such knowledge of the transcendental, 
immeasurable character of Duty, we call the basis 
of all Gospels, the essence of all Religion : he who 
with his whole soul knows not this, as yet knows 
nothing, as yet is properly nothing. 

This, happily for him, Johnson was one of those 
that knew : under a certain authentic Symbol, it 
stood for ever present to his eyes : a Symbol, in- 
deed, waxing old as doth a garment; yet which 
had guided forward, as their Banner and celestial 
Pillar of Fire, innumerable saints and witnesses, 
the fathers of our modern world ; and which for him 
also had still a sacred significance. It does not 
appear that, at any time, Johnson was what we call 
irreligious : but in his sorrows and isolation, when 
hope died away, and only a long vista of suffering 
and toil lay before him to the end, then first did 
Religion shine forth in its meek, everlasting clear- 
ness; even as the stars do in black night, which 
in the daytime and dusk were hidden by inferior 
lights. How a true man, in the midst of errors and 
uncertainties, shall work out for himself a sure Life- 
truth ; and adjusting the transient to the eternal, 



72 SAMUEL JOHNSON. 

amid the fragments of ruined Temples build uj 
with toil and pain, a little Altar for himself, ac 
worship there; how Samuel Johnson, in the era j 
Voltaire, can purify and fortify his soul, and hold 
real communion with the Highest, ' in the Church 
of St. Clement Danes :' this too stands all un- 
folded in his Biography, and is among the most 
touching and memorable things there ; a thing to 
be looked at with pity, admiration, awe. Johnson's 
Religion was as the light of life to him ; without it, 
his heart was all sick, dark, and had no guidance 
left. 

He is now enlisted, or impressed, into that un- 
speakable shoeblack-seraph Army of Authors ; but 
can feel hereby that he fights under a celestial flag, 
and will quit him like a man. The first grand re- 
quisite, an assured heart, he therefore has : what 
his outward equipments and accoutrements are, is 
the next question; an important, though inferior 
one. His intellectual stock, intrinsically viewed, is 
perhaps inconsiderable : the furnishings of an En- 
glish School and English University ; good know- 
ledge of the Latin tongue, a more uncertain one of 
Greek : this is a rather slender stock of Education 
wherewith to front the world. But then it is to be 
remembered that his world was England ; that such 
was the culture England commonly supplied and 
expected. Besides Johnson has been a voracious 
reader, though a desultory one, and offcenest in 
strange scholastic, too obsolete Libraries ; he has 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 73 

also rubbed shoulders with the press of Actual Life, 
for some thirty years now : views or hallucinations 
of innumerable things are weltering to' and fro in 
him. Above all, be his weapons what they may, 
he has an arm that can wield them. Nature has 
given him her choicest gift, — an open eye and heart. 
He will look on the world, wheresoever he can catch 
a glimpse of it, with eager curiosity : to the last, 
we find this a striking characteristic of him ; for all 
human interests he has a sense ; the meanest handi- 
craftsman could interest him, even in extreme age, 
by speaking of his craft : the ways of men are all 
interesting to him ; any human thing, that he did 
not know, he wished to know. Reflection, more- 
over, Meditation, was what he practised incessantly, 
with or without his will : for the mind of the man 
was earnest, deep as well as humane. Thus would 
the world, such fragments of it as he could survey, 
form itself, or continually tend to form itself, into 
a coherent Whole; on any and on all phases of 
which, his vote and voice must be well worth listen- 
ing to. As a Speaker of the Word, he will speak 
real words; no idle jargon, or hollow triviality will 
issue from him. His aim too is clear, attainable ; 
that of working for his wages : let him do this ho- 
nestly, and all else will follow of its own accord. 

With such omens, into such a warfare, did John- 
son go forth. A rugged hungry Kerne or Gallow- 
glass, as we called him : yet indomitable ; in whom 
lay the true spirit of a Soldier. With giant's force 



74 SAMUEL JOHNSON. 

he toils, since such is his appointment, were it but 
at hewing of wood and drawing of water for old 
sedentary bushy- wigged Cave; distinguishes him- 
self by mere quantity, if there is to be no other 
distinction. He can write all things ; frosty Latin 
verses, if these are the saleable commodity ; Book- 
prefaces, Political Philippics, Review Articles, Par- 
liamentary Debates : all things he does rapidly ; 
still more surprising, all things he does thoroughly 
and well. How he sits there, in his rough-hewn, 
amorphous bulk, in that upper-room at St. John's. 
Gate, and trundles off sheet after sheet of those Se- 
nate-of-Lilliput Debates, to the clamorous Printer's 
Devils waiting for them, with insatiable throat, 
downstairs ; himself perhaps im/pransus all the 
while ! Admire also the greatness of Literature ; 
how a grain of mustard-seed cast into its* Nile- 
waters, shall settle in the teeming mould, and be 
found, one day, as a Tree, in whose branches all 
the fowls of heaven may lodge. Was it not so with 
these Lilliput Debates? In that small project and 
act began the stupendous Fourth Estate ; whose 
wide world- embracing influences what eye can take 
in ; in whose boughs are there not already fowls 
of strange feather lodged ? Such, things, and far 
stranger, were done in that wondrous old Portal, 
even in latter times. And then figure Samuel 
dining c behind the screen/ from a trencher covertly 
handed in to him, at a preconcerted nod from the 
c great bushy wig ; ; Samuel too ragged to shew face, 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 75 

yet c made a happy man of ' by hearing his praise 
spoken. If to Johnson himself, then much more 
to us, may that St. John's Gate be a place we can 
' never pass without veneration/*" 

# All Johnson's places of resort and abode are venerable, and 
now indeed to the many as well as to the few ; for his name has 
become great ; and, as we must often with a kind of sad admira- 
tion recognise, there is, even to the rudest man, no greatness so 
venerable as intellectual, as spiritual greatness ; nay properly 
there is no other venerable at all. For example, what soul-sub- 
duing magic, for the very clown or craftsman of our England, 
lies in the word c Scholar !' " He is a Scholar •" he is a man wiser 
than we ; of a wisdom to us boundless, infinite : who shall speak 
his worth ! Such things, we say,, fill us with a certain pathetic 
admiration of defaced and obstructed yet glorious man; arch- 
angel though in ruins, — or rather, though in rubbish, of encum- 
brances and mud -incrustations, which also are not to be per- 
petual. 

Nevertheless, in this mad-whirlhig all-forgetting London, the 
haunts of the mighty that were can seldom without a strange 
difficulty be discovered. Will any man, for instance, tell us which 
bricks it was in Lincoln's Inn Buildings that Ben Jonson's hand 
and trowel laid ? No man, it is to be feared, — and also grumbled 
at. With Samuel Johnson may it prove otherwise ! A Gentle- 
man of the British Museum is said to have made drawings of all 
his residences : the blessing of Old Mortality be upon h im ! We 
ourselves, not without labour and risk, lately discovered GrOUGH 
Square, between Fleet Street and Holborn (adjoining both to 
Bolt Cotjet and Johnson's Court) ; and, on the second day of 
search, the very House there, wherein the English Dictionary 
was composed. It is the first or corner house on the right hand, 
as you enter through the arched way from the North- west. The 
actual occupant, an elderly, well- washed, decent-looking man, in- 
vited us to enter; and courteously undertook to be cicerone; 
though in his memory lay nothing but the foolishest jumble and 
hallucination. It is a stout old-fashioned, oak-balustraded house : 
" I have spent many a pound and penny on it since then," said 



76 SAMUEL JOHNSON. 

Poverty, Distress, and as yet Obscurity, are his 
companions: so poor is he that his Wife must 
leave him, and seek shelter among other rela- 
tions ; Johnson' s household has accommodation for 
one inmate only. To all his ever-varying, ever- 
recurring troubles, moreover, must be added this 
continual one of ill health, and its concomitant 
depressiveness : a galling load, which would have 
crushed most common mortals into desperation, 
is his appointed ballast and life-burden ; he c could 
not remember the day he had passed free from 
pain/ Nevertheless, Life, as we said before, is al- 
ways Life : a healthy soul, imprison it as you will, 
in squalid garrets, shabby coat, bodily sickness, or 
whatever else, will assert its heaven-granted inde- 
feasible Freedom, its right to conquer difficulties, 
to do work, even to feel gladness. Johnson does 
not whine over his existence, but manfully makes 
the most and best of it. c He said, a man might 
€ live in a garret at eighteen-pence a-week : few 
* people would inquire where he lodged; and if 
' they did, it was easy to say, " Sir, I am to be 

the worthy Landlord: "here, you see, this Bedroom was the 
Doctor's study; that was the garden" (a plot of delved ground 
somewhat larger than a bed-quilt) " where he walked for exercise ; 
"these three garret Bedrooms" (where his three Copyists sat and 
wrote) "were the place he kept his — Pupils in!" Tenvpus edax 
rerum! Yet fer ax also : for our friend now added, with a wistful 
look, which strove to seem merely historical: "I let it all in 
Lodgings, to respectable gentlemen; by the quarter, or the 
month ; it's all one to me." — " To me also," whispered the Grhost 
of Samuel, as we went pensively our ways. {Note of 1832.) 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 77 

' found at such a place." By spending threepence 
'in a coffee-house, he might be for some hours 
' every day in very good company ; he might dine 
c for sixpence, breakfast on bread and milk for a 
■ penny, and do without supper. On clean-shirt- 
' day he went abroad, and paid visits/ Think by 
whom, and of whom this was uttered, and ask then, 
Whether there is more pathos in it than in a whole 
circulating-library of Giaours and Harolds, or less 
pathos ? On another occasion, ' when Dr. Johnson, 
f one day, read his own Satire, in which the life of 
c a scholar is painted, with the various obstructions 
'thrown in his way to fortune and to fanfe, he 
' burst into a passion of tears : Mr. Thrale's family 
' and Mr. Scott only were present, who, in a jocose 
I way, clapped him on the back, and said, " What 's 
e all this, my dear sir ? Why you and I and Her- 
' cules, you know, were all troubled with melan- 
choly." He was a very large man, and made out 
c the triumvirate with Johnson and Hercules comi- 
1 cally enough/ These were sweet tears ; the sweet 
victorious remembrance lay in them of toils indeed 
frightful, yet never flinched from, and now tri- 
umphed over. ' One day it shall delight you also 
f to remember labour done ! 9 — Neither, though 
Johnson is obscure and poor, need the highest en- 
joyment of existence, that of heart freely commu- 
ning with heart, be denied him. Savage and he 
wander homeless through the streets ; without bed, 
yet not without friendly converse; such another 



78 SAMUEL JOHNSON. 

conversation not, it is like, producible in the proud J 
est drawing-room of London. Nor, under the voidH 
Night, upon the hard pavement, are their own woes! 
the only topic : nowise ; they " will stand by the™ 
country," the two ' Backwoods-men' of the Bricis 
Desert ! 

Of all outward evils Obscurity is perhaps in it- J 
self the least. To Johnson, as to a healthy-minded ■ 
man, the fantastic article, sold or given under the 
title of Fame, had little or no value but its intrinsic 
one. He prized it as the means of getting hmj 
employment and good wages ; scarcely as anything \ 
xnor6. His light and guidance came from a loftier j 
source ; of which, in honest aversion to all hypo- 
crisy or pretentious talk, he spoke not to men; nay 
perhaps, being of a healthy mind, had never spoken \ 
to himself. We reckon it a striking fact in John- 
son's history, this carelessness of his to Fame. 
Most authors speak of their 'Fame' as if it were 
a quite priceless matter ; the grand ultimatum, and 
heavenly Constantine's-Banner they had to follow, 
and conquer under. — Thy c Fame ! ' Unhappj/ mor- 
tal, where will it and thou both be in some fifty 
years ? Shakspeare himself has lasted but two 
hundred; Homer (partly by accident) three thou- 
sand : and does not already an Eternity encircle 
every Me and every Thee ? Cease, then, to sit 
feverishly hatching on that f Fame' of thine ; and 
flapping, and shrieking with fierce hisses, like 
brood-goose on her last egg, if man shall or dare 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 79 

approach it ! Quarrel not with me, hate me not, 
my Brother : make what thou canst of thy egg, 
and welcome : God knows, I will not steal it ; I be- 
lieve it to be addle, — Johnson, for his part, was no 
man to be killed by a review; concerning which 
matter, it was said by a benevolent person : If any 
author can be reviewed to death, let it be, with all 
convenient despatch, done. Johnson thankfully re- 
ceives any word spoken in his favour; is nowise 
disobliged by a lampoon, but will look at it, if 
pointed out to him, and shew how it might have 
been done better : the lampoon itself is indeed 
nothing, a soap-bubble that, next moment, will be- 
come a drop of sour suds ; but in the meanwhile, 
if it do anything, it keeps him more in the world's 
eye, and the next bargain will be all the richer : 
"Sir, if they should cease to talk of me, I must 
starve." Sound heart and understanding head : 
these fail no man, not even a Man of Letters ! 

Obscurity, however, was, in Johnson's case, whe- 
ther a light or heavy evil, likely to be no lasting 
one. He is animated by the spirit of a true work- 
man, resolute to do his work well; and he does 
his work well ; all his work, tha/t of writing, that of 
living. A man of this stamp is unhappily not so 
common in the literary or in any other department 
of the world, that he can continue always unno- 
ticed. By slow degrees, Johnson emerges ; loom- 
ing, at first, huge and dim in the eye of an observ- 
ant few ; at last disclosed, in his real proportions, 



80 SAMUEL JOHNSON. 

to the eye of the whole world, and encircled with 
c light-nimbus' of glory, so that whoso is not blind 
must and shall behold him. By slow degrees, we 
said ; for this also is notable ; slow but sure : as 
his fame waxes not by exaggerated clamour of what 
he seems to be, but by better and better insight of 
what he is, so it will last and stand wearing, being 
genuine. Thus indeed is it always, or nearly al- 
ways, with true fame. The heavenly Luminary 
rises amid vapours : stargazers enough must scan 
it with critical telescopes; it makes no blazing, 
the world can either look at it, or forbear looking 
at it; not till after a time and times, does its 
celestial eternal nature become indubitable. Plea- 
sant, on the other hand, is the blazing of a Tar- 
barrel; the crowd dance merrily round it, with 
loud huzzaing, universal three-times-three, and, 
like Homer's peasants, 'bless the useful light :' but 
unhappily it so soon ends in darkness, foul choking j 
smoke ; and is kicked into the gutters, a nameless 
imbroglio of charred staves, pitch-cinders and voM 
missement du diable ! 

But indeed, from of old, Johnson has enjoyed a 
all or nearly all that Fame can yield any man : the 
respect, the obedience of those that are about hiid| 
and inferior to him ; of those whose opinion alonej 
can have any forcible impression on him. A little 
circle gathers round the Wise man; which gra- 
dually enlarges as the report thereof spreads, ana 
more can come to see, and to believe ; for Wisdonw 



j 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 81 

is precious, and of irresistible attraction to all. c An 
inspired-idiot/ Goldsmith, hangs strangely about 
him ; though, as Hawkins says, ( he loved not John- 
' son, but rather envied him for his parts ; and once 
c entreated a friend to desist from praising him, "for 
i in doing so," said he, " you harrow up my very 
' soul ! " ' Yet, on the whole, there is no evil in 
the € gooseberry-fool ;' but rather much good; of 
a finer, if of a weaker, sort than Johnson's ; and 
all the more genuine that he himself could never 
become conscious of it, — though unhappily never 
cease attempting to become so : the Author of the 
genuine Vicar of Wakefield, nill he, will he, must 
needs fly towards such a mass of genuine Man- 
hood; and Dr. Minor keep gyrating round Dr. 
Major, alternately attracted and repelled. Then 
there is the chivalrous Topham Beauclerk, with his 
sharp wit, and gallant courtly ways : there is Ben- 
net Langton, an orthodox gentleman, and worthy ; 
though Johnson once laughed, louder almost than 
mortal, at his last will and testament ; and c could 
f not stop his merriment, but continued it all the 
' way till he got without the Temple-gate ; then 
' burst into such a fit of laughter that he appeared 
'to be almost in a convulsion; and, in order to 
€ support himself, laid hold of one of the posts at 
€ the side of the foot-pavement, and sent forth peals 
' so loud that, in the silence of the night, his voice 
c seemed to resound from Temple-bar to Pleet- 
' ditch!' Lastly comes his solid-thinking, solid- 



82 SAMUEL JOHNSON. 

feeding Thrale, the well-beloved man ; with Thralia, 
a bright papilionaceous creature, whom the ele- 
phant loved to play with, and wave to and fro upon 
his trunk. Not to speak of a reverent Bozzy, for 
what need is there farther? — Or of the spiritual 
Luminaries, with tongue or pen, who made that 
age remarkable ; or of Highland Lairds drinking, 
in fierce usquebaugh, " Your health, Toctor Shon- 
son \" — Still less of many such as that poor c Mr. 
F. Lewis/ older in date, of whose birth, death, 
and whole terrestrial res gestae, this only, and 
strange enough this actually, survives : " Sir, he 
lived in London, and hung loose upon society \" 
Stat Parvi nominis umbra. — 

In bis fifty-third year, he is beneficed, by the 
royal bounty, with a Pension of three hundred 
pounds. Loud clamour is always more or less 
insane : but probably the insanest of all loud cla- 
mours in the eighteenth century was this that was 
raised about Johnson's Pension. Men seem to be 
led by the noses : but in reality, it is by the ears, 
— as some ancient slaves were, who had their ears 
bored; or as some modern quadrupeds may be, 
whose ears are long. Very falsely was it said, 
' Names do not change Things/ Names do change 
Things ; nay for most part they are the only sub- 
stance, which mankind can discern in Things. The 
whole sum that Johnson, during the remaining 
twenty -two years of his life, drew from the public 
funds of England, would have supported some 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 83 

Supreme Priest for about half as many weeks ; it 
amounts very nearly to the revenue of our poorest 
Church-Overseer for one twelvemonth. Of secular 
Administrators of Provinces, and Horse-subduers, 
and Game-destroyers, we shall not so much as 
speak: but who were the Primates of England, 
and the Primates of all England, during John- 
son's days ? No man has remembered. Again, is 
the Primate of all England something, or is he 
nothing? If something, then what but the man 
who, in the supreme degree, teaches and spiritu- 
ally edifies, and leads towards Heaven by guiding 
wisely through the Earth, the living souls that 
inhabit England ? We touch here upon deep mat- 
ters; which but remotely concern us, and might 
lead us into still deeper : clear, in the meanwhile, 
it is that the true Spiritual Edifier and Soul's- 
Father of all England was, and till very lately 
continued to be, the man named Samuel Johnson, 
— whom this scot -and -lot -paying world cackled 
reproachfully to see remunerated like a Supervisor 
of Excise ! 

If Destiny had beaten hard on poor Samuel, and 
did never cease to visit him too roughly, yet the 
last section of his Life might be pronounced vic- 
torious, and on the whole happy. He was not 
idle ; but now no longer goaded on by want ; the 
light which had shone irradiating the dark haunts 
of Poverty, now illuminates the circles of Wealth, 
of a certain culture and elegant intelligence; he 



84 SAMUEL JOHNSON. 

who had once been admitted to speak with Ed- 
mund Cave and Tobacco Browne, now admits a 
Reynolds and a Burke to speak with him. Loving- 
Mends are there ; listeners, even answerers : the 
fruit of his long labours lies round him in fair le- 
gible Writings, of Philosophy, Eloquence, Morality, 
Philology ; some excellent, all worthy and genuine 
Works ; for which too, a deep, earnest murmur of 
thanks reaches him from all ends of his Father- 
land. Nay there are works of Goodness, of un- 
dying Mercy, which even he has possessed the 
power to do : c What I gave I have ; what I spent 
I had ! ' Early friends had long sunk into the 
grave; yet in his soul they ever lived, fresh and 
clear, with soft pious breathings towards them, not 
without a still hope of one clay meeting them 
again in purer union. Such was Johnson's Life : 
the victorious Battle of a free, true Man. Finally 
he died the death of the free and true : a dark 
cloud of Death, solemn and not untinged with 
haloes of immortal Hope, 'took him away/ and 
our eyes could no longer behold him ; but can still 
behold the trace and impress of his courageous, 
honest spirit, deep-legible in the World's Business, 
wheresoever he walked and was. 

To estimate the quantity of Work that John- 
son performed, how much poorer the World were 
had it wanted him, can, as in all such cases, never 
be accurately done ; cannot, till after some longer 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 85 

space, be approximately done. All work is as seed 
sown ; it grows and spreads, and sows itself anew, 
and so, in endless palingenesia, lives and works. 
To Johnson's Writings, good and solid, and still 
profitable as they are, we have already rated his 
Life and Conversation as superior. By the one 
and by the other, who shall compute what effects 
have been produced, and are still, and into deep 
Time, producing? 

So much, however, we can already see : It is now 
some three quarters of a century that Johnson 
has been the Prophet of the English; the man 
by whose light the English people, in public and 
in private, more than by any other man's, have 
guided their existence. Higher light than that 
immediately practical one ; higher virtue than an 
honest Prudence, he could not then communicate; 
nor perhaps could they have received ; such light, 
such virtue, however, he did communicate. How 
to thread this labyrinthic Time, the fallen and fall- 
ing Ruin of Times ; to silence vain Scruples, hold 
firm to the last the fragments of old Belief, and 
with earnest eye still discern some glimpses of a 
true path, and go forward thereon, ' in a world 
where there is much to be done, and little to be 
known ;' this is what Samuel Johnson, by act and 
word, taught his Nation ; what his Nation received 
and learned of him, more than of any other. "We 
«an view him as the preserver and transmitter of 
whatsoever was genuine in the spirit of Toryism ; 



86 SAMUEL JOHNSON. 

which genuine spirit, it is now becoming manifest^ 
must again embody itself in all new forms of So- 
ciety, be what they may, that are to exist, and 
have continuance — elsewhere than on Paper. The 
last in many things, Johnson was the last genuine 
Tory; the last of Englishmen who, with strong 
voice and wholly-believing heart, preached the 
Doctrine of Standing still; who, without selfish- 
ness or slavishness, reverenced the existing Powers, 
and could assert the privileges of rank, though 
himself poor, neglected and plebeian; who had 
heart-devoutness with heart-hatred of cant, was 
orthodox-religious with his eyes open ; and in all 
things and everywhere spoke out in plain English, 
from a soul wherein Jesuitism could find no har- 
bour, and with the front and tone not of a diplo- 
matist but of a man. 

This last of the Tories was Johnson : not Burke, 
as is often said ; Burke was essentially a Whig, and 
only, on reaching the verge of the chasm towards 
which Whiggism from the first was inevitably 
leading, recoiled ; and, like a man vehement rather 
than earnest, a resplendent far-sighted Rhetorician 
rather than a deep sure Thinker, recoiled with no 
measure, convulsively, and damaging what he drove 
back with him. 

In a world which exists by the balance of An- 
tagonisms, the respective merit of the Conservator 
and the Innovator must ever remain debatable. 
Great, in the meanwhile, and undoubted for both 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 87 

sides, is the merit of him who, in a day of Change, 
walks wisely, honestly. Johnson's aim was in it- 
self an impossible one : this of stemming the eter- 
nal Flood of Time; of clutching all things, and 
anchoring them down, and saying, Move not ! — 
how could it, or should it, ever have success ? The 
strongest man can but retard the current partially 
and for a short hour. Yet even in such shortest 
retardation, may not an inestimable value lie ? If 
England has escaped the blood-bath of a French 
Revolution; and may yet, in virtue of this delay 
and of the experience it has given, work out her 
deliverance calmly into a new Era, let Samuel 
Johnson, beyond all contemporary or succeeding 
men, have the praise for it. We said above that 
he was appointed to be Ruler of the British Nation 
for a season : whoso will look beyond the surface, 
into the heart of the world's movements, may find 
that all Pitt Administrations, and Continental 
Subsidies, and Waterloo victories, rested on the 
possibility of making England, yet a little while, 
Toryish, Loyal to the Old; and this again on the 
anterior reality, that the Wise had found such 
Loyalty still practicable, and recommendable. 
England had its Hume, as France had its Vol- 
taires and Diderots ; but the Johnson was peculiar 
to us. 

If we ask now, by what endowment it mainly 
was that Johnson realised such a Life for himself 



88 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 



and others; what quality of character the main 
phenomena of his Life may be most naturally de- 
duced from/ and his other qualities most naturally 
subordinated to, in our conception of him, perhaps 
the answer were : The quality of Courage, of Va- 
lour; that Johnson was a Brave Man. The Cou- 
rage that can go forth, once and away, to Chalk- 
Farm, and have itself shot, and snuffed out, with 
decency, is nowise wholly what we mean here. 
Such courage we indeed esteem an exceeding small 
matter; capable of coexisting with a life full of 
falsehood, feebleness, poltroonery and despicability. 
Nay oftener it is Cowardice rather that produces the 
result : for consider, Is the Chalk-Farm Pistoleer 
inspired with any reasonable Belief and Determi- 
nation; or is he hounded-on by haggard indefin- 
able Fear, — how he will be cut at public places, 
and ' plucked geese of the neighbourhood' will wag 
their tongues at him a plucked goose ? If he go 
then, and be shot without shrieking or audible 
uproar, it is well for him: nevertheless there is 
nothing amazing in it. Courage to manage all this 
has not perhaps been denied to any man, or to any 
woman. Thus, do not recruiting sergeants drum 
through the streets of manufacturing towns, and 
collect ragged losels enough ; every one of whom, 
if once dressed in red, and trained a little, will 
receive fire cheerfully for the small sum of one 
shilling per diem, and have the soul blown out of 
him at last, with perfect propriety. The Courage 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 89 

that dares only die, is on the whole no sublime 
affair ; necessary indeed, yet universal ; pitiful when 
it begins to parade itself. On this Globe of ours, 
there are some thirty-six persons that manifest it, 
seldom with the smallest failure, during every se- 
cond of time. Nay look at Newgate : do not the 
offscourings of Creation, when condemned to the 
gallows as if they were not men but vermin, walk 
thither with decency, and even to the scowls and 
hootings of the whole Universe give their stern 
good-night in silence ? What is to be undergone 
only once, we may undergo ; what must be, comes 
almost of its own accord. Considered as Duellist, 
what a poor figure does the fiercest Irish "Whisker- 
ando make, compared with any English Game-cock, 
such as you may buy for fifteen pence ! 

The Courage we desire and prize is not the Cou- 
rage to die decently, but to live manfully. This, 
when by God's grace it has been given, lies deep 
in the soul ; like genial heat, fosters all other vir- 
tues and gifts ; without it they could not live. In 
spite of our innumerable Waterloos and Peterloos, 
and such campaigning as there has been, this Cou- 
rage we allude to, and call the only true one, is 
perhaps rarer in these last ages, than it has been 
in any other since the Saxon Invasion under Hen- 
gist. Altogether extinct it can never be among 
men; otherwise the species Man were no longer 
for this world : here and there, in all times, under 
various guises, men are sent hither not only to 



90 SAMUEL JOHNSON. 

demonstrate but exhibit it, and testify, as from 
heart to heart, that it is still possible, still prac- 
ticable. 

Johnson, in the eighteenth century, and as Man 
of Letters, was one of such; and, in good truth, 
c the bravest of the brave/ What mortal could 
have more to war with ? Yet, as we saw, he yielded 
not, faltered not; he fought, and even, such was 
his blessedness, prevailed. Whoso will understand 
what it is to have a man's heart, may find that, 
since the time of John Milton, no braver heart had 
beat in any English bosom than Samuel Johnson 
now bore. Observe too that he never called him- 
self brave, never felt himself to be so ; the more 
completely was so. No Giant Despair, no Gol- 
gotha Death-dance or Sorcerer's- Sabbath of c Lite- 
rary Life in London/ appals this pilgrim ; he works 
resolutely for deliverance; in still defiance, steps 
stoutly along. The thing that is given him to do, 
he can make himself do ; what is to be endured, 
he can endure in silence. 

How the great soul of old Samuel, consuming 
daily his own bitter unalienable allotment of misery 
and toil, shews beside the poor flimsy little soul of 
young Boswell; one day flaunting in the ring of 
vanity, tarrying by the wine-cup and crying, Aha, 
the wine is red ; the next day deploring his down- 
pressed, night-shaded, quite poor estate, and think- 
ing it unkind that the whole movement of the 
Universe should go on, while his digestive-appara- 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 91 

tus had stopped ! We reckon Johnson's ' talent of 
silence' to be among his great and too rare gifts. 
Where there is nothing farther to be done, there 
shall nothing farther be said: like his own poor 
blind Welshwoman, he accomplished somewhat, and 
also ' endured fifty years of wretchedness with 
unshaken fortitude/ How grim was Life to him ; 
a sick Prison-house and Doubting-castle ! ( His 
' great business/ he would profess, ' was to escape 
' from himself/ Yet towards all this he has taken 
his position and resolution ; can dismiss it all ' with 
frigid indifference, having little to hope or to fear/ 
Friends are stupid, and pusillanimous, and parsi- 
monious ; c wearied of his stay, yet offended at his 
departure / it is the manner of the world. ' By 
popular delusion/ remarks he with a gigantic 
calmness, i illiterate writers will rise into renown :' 
it is portion of the History of English Literature ; 
a perennial thing, this same popular delusion ; and 
will — alter the character of the Language. 

Closely connected with this quality of Valour, 
partly as springing from it, partly as protected by 
it, are the more recognisable qualities of Truthful- 
ness in word and thought, and Honesty in action. 
There is a reciprocity of influence here : for as the 
realising of Truthfulness and Honesty is the life- 
light and great aim of Valour, so without Valour 
they cannot, in anywise, be realised. Now, in spite 
of all practical shortcomings, no one that sees into 
the significance of Johnson, will say that his prime 



92 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 



object was not Truth. In conversation, doubtless,, 
you may observe him, on occasion, fighting as if] 
for victory ; — and must pardon these ebulliences of 
a careless hour, which were not without tempt atiom 
and provocation. Remark likewise two things;? 
that such prize-arguings were ever on merely super- 
ficial debatable questions ; and then that they wercl 
argued generally by the fair laws of battle and logic!" 
fence, by one cunning in that same. If their pur-j 
pose was excusable, their effect was harmless, per- 
haps beneficial : that of taming noisy mediocrity! 
and shewing it another side of a debatable matter i 
to see both sides of which was, for the first timefl 
to see the Truth of it. In his Writings themselves 
are errors enough, crabbed prepossessions enough, 
yet these also of a quite extraneous and accidental 
nature; nowhere a wilful shutting of the eyes tJ 
the Truth. Nay, is there not everywhere a hearts 
felt discernment, singular, almost admirable, if im 
consider through what confused conflicting lightil 
and hallucinations it had to be attained, of thq 
highest everlasting Truth, and beginning of all 
Truths : this namely, that man is ever, and evdj 
in the age of Wilkes and Whitefield, a Revelation 
of God to man; and lives, moves and has his beina 
in Truth only ; is either true, or, in strict speechj 
is not at all? 

Quite spotless, on the other hand, is Johnson's 
love of Truth, if we look at it as expressed in Prac«1 
tice, as what we have named Honesty of actioia 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 93 

f Clear your mind of Cant/ clear it, throw Cant 
utterly away: such was his emphatic, repeated 
precept ; and did not he himself faithfully conform 
to it ? The Life of this man has been, as it were, 
turned inside out, and examined with microscopes 
by friend and foe ; yet was there no Lie found in 
him. His Doings and Writings are not shows but 
performances : you may weigh them in the balance, 
and they will stand weight. Not a line, not a sen- 
tence is dishonestly done, is other than it pretends 
to be. Alas ! and he wrote not out of inward 
inspiration, but to earn his wages : and with that 
grand perennial tide of c popular delusion' flowing 
by ; in whose waters he nevertheless refused to fish, 
to whose rich oyster-beds the dive was too muddy 
for him. Observe, again, with what innate hatred 
of Cant, he takes for himself, and offers to others, 
the lowest possible view of his business, which he 
followed with such nobleness. Motive for writing 
he had none, as he often said, but money; and yet 
he wrote so. Into the region of Poetic Art he 
indeed never rose ; there was no ideal without him 
avowing itself in his work : the nobler was that 
unavowed ideal which lay within him, and com- 
manded saying, "Work out thy Artisanship in the 
spirit of an Artist ! They who talk loudest 
about the dignity of Art, and fancy that they 
too are Artistic guild-brethren, and of the Celes- 
tials, — let them consider well what manner of 
man this was, who felt himself to be only a hired 



94 SAMUEL JOHNSON. 

day-labourer. A labourer that was worthy of his^j 
hire ; that has laboured not as an eye-servant, but - 
as one found faithful! Neither was Johnson hr 
those days perhaps wholly a unique. Time was; 
when, for money, you might have ware : and needed 
not, in all departments, in that of the Epic Poem, 
in that of the Blacking-Bottle, to rest content with 
the mere persuasion that you had ware. It was a 
happier time. But as yet the seventh Apocalyptic] 
Bladder (of Puffery) had not been rent open, — to 
whirl and grind, as in a West-Indian Tornado, all 
earthly trades and things into wreck, and dust, and 
consummation, — and regeneration. Be it quickly, 
since it must be ! — 

That Mercy can dwell only with Valour, is an 
old sentiment or proposition ; which, in Johnson, 
again receives confirmation. Few men on record 
have had a more merciful, tenderly affectionate na- 
ture than old Samuel. He was called the Bear; 
and did indeed too often look, and roar, like one ; 
being forced to it in his own defence : yet within 
that shaggy exterior of his there beat a heart 
warm as a mother's, soft as a little child's. Nay 
generally, his very roaring was but the anger of 
affection : the rage of a Bear, if you will ; but of a j 
Bear bereaved of her whelps. Touch his Religion, 
glance at the Church of England, or the Divine 
Eight ; and he was upon you ! These things werel 
his Symbols of all that was good and precious 
for men ; his very Ark of the Covenant : whoso 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 95 

laid hand on them tore asunder his heart of hearts. 
Not out of hatred to the opponent, but of love 
to the thing opposed, did Johnson grow cruel 
fiercely contradictory : this is an important dis- 
tinction; never to be forgotten in our censure of 
his conversational outrages. But observe also with 
what humanity, what openness of love, he can at- 
tach himself to all things : to a blind old woman, 
to a Doctor Levett, to a Cat c Hodge/ 'His 
* thoughts in the latter part of his life were fre- 
quently employed on his deceased friends; he 
' often muttered these or such like sentences: 
J " Poor man ! and then he died." ' How he pa- 
tiently converts his poor home into a Lazaretto ; 
endures, for long years, the contradiction of the 
miserable and unreasonable; with him unconnected, 
save that they had no other to yield them refuge ! 
Generous old man ! Worldly possession he has 
little; yet of this he gives freely; from his own 
hard-earned shilling, the half-pence for the poor, 
that c waited his coming out/ are not withheld : 
the poor c waited the coming out' of one not quite 
so poor ! A Sterne can write sentimentalities on 
Dead Asses : Johnson has a rough voice ; but he 
finds the wretched Daughter of Vice fallen down in 
the streets ; carries her home on his own shoulders, 
and like a good Samaritan gives help to the help- 
needing, worthy or unworthy. Ought not Charity, 
even in that sense, to cover a multitude of sins ? 
No Penny-a-week Committee-Lady, no manager of 



96 SAMUEL JOHNSON. 

Soup-Kitchens, dancer at Charity-Balls, was tin 
rugged, stern-visaged man : but where, in all Eng- 
land, could there have been found another soul sen 
full of Pity, a hand so heavenlike bounteous as] 
his? The widow's mite, we know, was greater 
than all the other gifts. 

Perhaps it is this divine feeling of AffectionJ 
throughout manifested, that principally attracts us] 
towards Johnson. A true brother of men is hel 
and filial lover of the Earth; who, with littM 
bright spots of Attachment, ' where lives and works 
€ some loved one/ has beautified ' this rough solitarij 
' Earth into a peopled garden/ Lichfield, with its] 
mostly dull and limited inhabitants, is to the lasa 
one of the sunny islets for him : Salve magna pa- 
rens ! Or read those Letters on his Mother*! 
death : what a genuine solemn grief and pity li§« 
recorded there ; a looking back into the Past, un- 
speakably mournful, unspeakably tender. And yej 
calm, sublime ; for he must now act, not look : his 
venerated Mother has been taken from him ; but 
he must now write a Rasselas to defray her fune- 
ral ! Again in this little incident, recorded in his] 
Book of Devotion, are not the tones of sacred Sor- 
row and Greatness deeper than in many a blank- 1 
verse Tragedy ; — as, indeed, ' the fifth act of a Tra- 
gedy/ though unrhymed, does ( lie in every death- \ 
bed, were it a peasant's, and of straw :' 

' Sunday, October 18, 1767. Yesterday, at about ted 
in the morning, I took my leave forever of my dear oil 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 97 

friend, Catherine Chambers, who came to live with my 
mother abont 1724, and has been but little parted from us 
since. She buried my father, my brother and my mother. 
She is now fifty-eight years old. 

' 1 desired all to withdraw ; then told her that we were 
to part forever ; that as Christians, we should part with 
prayer ; and that I would, if she was willing, say a short 
prayer beside her. She expressed great desire to hear me ; 
and held up her poor hands as she lay in bed, with great 
fervour, while I prayed kneeling by her. # # # 

' I then kissed her. She told me that to part was the 
greatest pain she had ever felt, and that she hoped we 
should meet again in a better place. I expressed, with 
swelled eyes and great emotion of tenderness, the same 
hopes. We kissed and parted ; I humbly hope, to meet 
again, and to part no more.' 

Tears trickling down the granite rock : a soft 
well of Pity springs within ! — Still more tragical 
is this other scene : ' Johnson mentioned that lie 
c could not in general accuse himself of having 
6 been an undutiful son. " Once, indeed," said he, 
' " I was disobedient : I refused to attend my father 
'to Uttoxeter market. Pride was the source of 
€ that refusal, and the remembrance of it was pain- 
' ful. A few years ago I desired to atone for this 
'fault."'— But by what method?— What method 
was now possible ? Hear it ; the words are again 
given as his own, though here evidently by a less 
capable reporter : 

' B Madam, I beg your pardon for the abruptness of my 
departure in the morning, but I was compelled to it by 
conscience. Fifty years ago, Madam, on this day, I com- 

H 



98 SAMUEL JOHNSON. 

mitted a breach of filial piety. My father had been in the 
habit of attending Uttoxeter market, and opening a stall 
there for the sale of his Books. Confined by indisposition, 
he desired me, that day, to go and attend the stall in his 
place. My pride prevented me ; I gave my father a re- 
fusal. — And now today I have been at Uttoxeter ; I went 
into the market, at the time of business, uncovered my 
head, and stood with it bare, for an hour, on the spot where 
my father's stall used to stand. In contrition I stood, and 
I hope the penance was expiatory.' 

Who does not figure to himself this spectacle, 
amid the c rainy weather, and the sneers/ or wonder, 
i of the bystanders ?' The memory of old Michael 
Johnson, rising from the far distance ; sad -beck- 
oning in the ' moonlight of memory : ? how he 
had toiled faithfully hither and thither ; patiently 
among the lowest of the low; been buffeted and 
beaten down, yet ever risen again, ever tried it 
anew — And oh ! when the wearied old man, as 
Bookseller, or Hawker, or Tinker, or whatsoever it 
was that Fate had reduced him to, begged help of 
thee for one day, — how savage, diabolic, was that 
mean Vanity, which answered, No ! He sleeps 
now; after life's fitful fever, he sleeps: but thou, 
O Merciless, how now wilt thou still the sting of 
that remembrance ? — The picture of Samuel John- 
son standing bareheaded in the market there, is 
one of the grandest and saddest we can paint. 
Repentance ! Repentance ! he proclaims, as with 
passionate sobs: but only to the ear of Heaven, 
if Heaven will give him audience : the earthly ear 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 99 

and heart, that should have heard it, are now 
closed, unresponsive forever. 

That this so keen-loving, soft-trembling Affec- 
tionateness, the inmost essence of his being, must 
have looked forth, in one form or another, through 
Johnson's whole character, practical and intellec- 
tual, modifying both, is not to be doubted. Yet 
through what singular distortions and superstitions, 
moping melancholies, blind habits, whims about 
c entering with the right foot/ and c touching every 
post as he walked along •/ and all the other mad 
chaotic lumber of a brain that, with sun-clear in- 
tellect, hovered forever on the verge of insanity, — 
must that same inmost essence have looked forth ; 
unrecognisable to all but the most observant ! Ac- 
cordingly it was not recognised; Johnson passed 
not for a fine nature, but for a dull, almost brutal 
one. Might not, for example, the first fruit of such 
a Lovingness, coupled with his quick Insight, have 
been expected to be a peculiarly courteous demea- 
nour as man among men? In Johnson's ' Polite- 
ness/ which he often, to the wonder of some, as- 
serted to be great, there was indeed somewhat that 
needed explanation. Nevertheless, if he insisted 
always on handing lady- visitors to their carriage ; 
though with the certainty of collecting a mob of 
gazers in Fleet Street, — as might well be, the beau 
having on, by way of court- dress, 'his rusty brown 
' morning suit, a pair of old shoes for slippers, a 
'little shrivelled wig sticking on the top of his 

LtfC. 



100 SAMUEL JOHNSON. 

' head, and the sleeves of his shirt and the knees 1 
'of his breeches hanging loose-/ — in all this we» 
can see the spirit of true Politeness, only shining 
through a strange medium. Thus again, in his \ 
apartments, at one time, there were unfortunately $ 
no chairs. ' A gentleman who frequently visited ] 
'him whilst writing his Idlers, constantly found 1 
c him at his desk, sitting on one with three legs ; \ 
( and on rising from it, he remarked that Johnson 
i never forgot its defect ; but would either hold it 
'in his hand, or place it with great composure 
' against some support ; taking no notice of its j 
i imperfection to his visitor/ — who meanwhile, we 
suppose, sat upon folios, or in the sartorial fashion- 
' It was remarkable in Johnson/ continues Miss 
Reynolds (Renny dear), 'that no external circum- 
s stances ever prompted him to make any apology, ; 
' or to seem even sensible of their existence. Whe- 
' ther this was the effect of philosophic pride, or of 
' some partial notion of his respecting high-breed- 
' ing, is doubtful/ That it was, for one thing, the 
effect of genuine Politeness, is nowise doubtful. \ 
Not of the Pharisaical Brummellean Politeness, 
which would suffer crucifixion rather than ask twice 
for soup : but the noble universal Politeness of a 
man, that knows the dignity of men, and feels his 
own ; such as may be seen in the patriarchal bear- 
ing of an Indian Sachem ; such as Johnson himself 
exhibited, when a sudden chance brought him into 
dialogue with his King. To us, with our view of 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 101 

the man, it nowise appears c strange' that he should 
have boasted himself cunning in the laws of Po- 
liteness; nor c stranger still/ habitually attentive 
to practise them. 

More legibly is this influence of the Loving heart 
to be traced in his intellectual character. What, 
indeed, is the beginning of intellect, the first in- 
ducement to the exercise thereof, but attraction 
towards somewhat, affection for it ? Thus too, who 
ever saw, or will see, any true talent, not to speak 
of genius, the foundation of which is not goodness, 
love ? From Johnson's strength of Affection, we 
deduce many of his intellectual peculiarities ; espe- 
cially that threatening array of perversions, known 
under the name of c Johnson's Prejudices/ Look- 
ing well into the root from which these sprang, we 
have long ceased to view them with hostility, can 
pardon and reverently pity them. Consider with 
what force early-imbibed opinions must have clung 
to a soul of this Affection. Those evil-famed Pre- 
judices of his, that Jacobitism, Church-of-Eng- 
landism, hatred of the Scotch, belief in Witches, 
and such like, what were they but the ordinary be- 
liefs of well-doing, well-meaning provincial English- 
men in that day ? First gathered by his Father's 
hearth ; round the kind ' country fires ' of native 
Staffordshire; they grew with his growth and 
strengthened with his strength : they were hal- 
lowed by fondest sacred recollections ; to part with 
them was parting with his heart's blood. If the 



102 SAMUEL JOHNSON. 

man who has no strength of Affection, strength ofj 
Belief, have no strength of Prejudice, let him thank " : : 
heaven for it, but to himself take small thanks. 

Melancholy it was, indeed, that the noble John- | 
son could not work himself loose from these ad- 
hesions ; that he could only purify them, and wear 
them with some nobleness. Yet let us understand 
how they grew out from the very centre of his 
being : nay, moreover, how they came to cohere in 
him with what formed the business and worth of 
his Life, the sum of his whole Spiritual Endeavour. 
For it is on the same ground that he became 
throughout an Edifier and Repairer, not, as the 
others of his make were, a Puller- down ; that in an 
age of universal Scepticism, England was still to 
produce its Believer. Mark too his candour even 
here; while a Dr. Adams, with placid surprise, 
asks, " Have we not evidence enough of the souTs 
immortality?" Johnson answers, "1 wish for 
more." But the truth is, in Prejudice, as in all 
things, Johnson was the product of England ; one 
of those good yeomen whose limbs were made in 
England : alas, the last of such Invincibles, their 
day being now done ! His culture is wholly Eng- 
lish ; that not of a Thinker but of a ( Scholar :' his 
interests are wholly English; he sees and knows 
nothing but England ; he is the John Bull of Spi- 
ritual Europe : let him live, love him, as he was and 
could not but be ! Pitiable it is, no doubt, that a 
Samuel Johnson should confute Hume's irreligious 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 103 

Philosophy by some c story from a Clergyman of 
the Bishoprick of Durham;' should see nothing 
in the great Frederick but ' Voltaire's lackey;' in 
Voltaire himself but a man acerrimi ingenii, pau- 
carum liter arum ; in Rousseau but one worthy to 
be hanged; and in the universal, long-prepared, 
inevitable Tendency of European Thought but a 
green-sick milkmaid's crotchet of, for variety's 
sake, c milking the Bull.' Our good, dear John ! 
Observe too what it is that he sees in the city of 
Paris : no feeblest glimpse of those D'Alemberts 
and Diderots, or of the strange questionable work 
they did ; solely some Benedictine Priests, to talk 
kitchen-latin with them about Editiones Principes. 
Ci Monsheer Nongtongpaw /" — Our dear, foolish 
John : yet is there a lion's heart within him ! — 
Pitiable all these things were, we say ; yet nowise 
inexcusable ; nay, as basis or as foil to much else 
that was in Johnson, almost venerable. Ought we 
not, indeed, to honour England, and English Insti- 
tutions and Way of Life, that they could still equip 
such a man; could furnish him in heart and head 
to be a Samuel Johnson, and yet to love them, 
and unyieldingly fight for them ? What truth and 
living vigour must such Institutions once have had, 
when, in the middle of the Eighteenth Century, 
there was still enough left in them for this ! 

It is worthy of note that, in our little British 
Isle, the two grand Antagonisms of Europe should 
have stood embodied, under their very highest 



104 SAMUEL JOHNSON. 

concentration, in two men produced simultane- 
ously among ourselves. Samuel Johnson and David 
Hume, as was observed, were children nearly of 
the same year : through life they were spectators of * 
the same Life-movement ; often inhabitants of the 
same city. Greater contrast, in all things, between^ 
two great men, could not be. Hume, well-born, 
competently provided for, whole in body and mind, 
of his own determination forces a way into Litera- 1 
ture : Johnson, poor, moonstruck, diseased, forlorn, 
is forced into it ' with the bayonet of necessity at I 
his back/ And w T hat a part did they severally play 
there ! As Johnson became the father of all suc- 
ceeding Tories ; so was Hume the father of all suc- 
ceeding Whigs, for his own Jacobitism w^as but an 
accident, as worthy to be named Prejudice as any 
of Johnson's. Again, if Johnson's culture was 
exclusively English; Hume's, in Scotland, became 
European ;— for which reason too we find his in- 
fluence spread deeply over all quarters of Europe, 
traceable deeply in all speculation, French, Ger- 
man, as well as domestic; while Johnson's name, 
out of England, is hardly anywhere to be met withjl 
In spiritual stature they are almost equal ; both 
great, among the greatest : yet how unlike in like- ] 
ness ! Hume has the widest methodising, compreJ 
hensive eye ; Johnson the keenest for perspicacity 
and minute detail : so had, perhaps chiefly, their 
education ordered it. Neither of the two rose into 
Poetry; yet both to some approximation thereof:! 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 105 

Hume to something of an Epic clearness and me- 
thod, as in his delineation o£ the Commonwealth 
Wars ; Johnson to many a deep Lyric tone of plain- 
tiveness and impetuous graceful power, scattered 
over his fugitive compositions. Both, rather to 
the general surprise, had a certain rugged Humour 
shining through their earnestness : the indication, 
indeed, that they were earnest men, and had sub- 
dued their wild world into a kind of temporary 
home and safe dwelling. Both were, by principle 
and habit, Stoics: yet Johnson with the greater 
merit, for he alone had very much to triumph over ; 
farther, he alone ennobled his Stoicism into De- 
votion. To Johnson Life was as a Prison, to be 
endured with heroic faith : to Hume it was little 
more than a foolish Bartholomew-Fair Show-booth, 
with the foolish crowdings and elbowings of which 
it was not worth while to quarrel ; the whole would 
break up, and be at liberty, so soon. Both realised 
the highest task of Manhood, that of living like 
men ; each died not unfitly, in his way : Hume as 
one, with factitious, half-false gaiety, taking leave 
of what was itself wholly but a Lie : Johnson as 
one, with awe-struck, yet resolute and piously ex- 
pectant heart, taking leave of a Reality, to enter a 
Reality still higher. Johnson had the harder pro- 
blem of it, from first to last : whether, with some 
hesitation, we can admit that he was intrinsically 
the better-gifted, may remain undecided. 

These two men now rest; the one in West- 



106 



SAMUEL JOHNSON. 



minster Abbey here ; the other in the Calton Hi 
Churchyard of Edinburgh. Through Life they i 
not meet : as contrasts, c like in unlike/ love ea 
other; so might they two have loved, and cor 
muned kindly,— had not the terrestrial dross an 
darkness, that was in them, withstood ! One da^ 
their spirits, what Truth was in each, will be foi 
working, living in harmony and free union, eve 
here below. They were the two half-men of the 
time : whoso should combine the intrepid Candoi 
and decisive scientific Clearness of Hume, with the 
Reverence, the Love and devout Humility of John- 
son, were the whole man of a new time. Till suet 
whole man arrive for us, and the distracted time 
admit of such, might the Heavens but bless poor 
England with half-men worthy to tie the shoe- 
latchets of these, resembling these even from afar ! ' 
Be both attentively regarded, let the true Effort 
of both prosper ; — and for the present, both take 
our affectionate farewell ! 



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